I've been finding a lot of popular press coverage distressing. Maybe I should
keep some sort of journal of my specific objections.
Here are a couple of bad habits which come to mind:
- not understanding or mentioning historical context
- presenting (or being aware of) only one side's position in a conflict
- being visibly impressed by power or capability, without discussing
where it came from, or whether or how someone else could acquire it
- assuming that a particular event will happen
- projecting trends without explaining the basis for the projection;
perceiving historical inevitability; ignoring the existence of
conflicts
- editorializing about people or groups not in a position to complain
about how they're characterized
- trying to fit people and ideas into familiar categories even where
they're importantly different from what a reader is familiar with
- adopting a prejudice or stereotype without commenting on it
- ignoring a diversity of motives among people who do some particular
thing
I got to celebrate the new year in Massachusetts with Eric and Kate, for
what I think was my eighth straight year celebrating with Eric. I also
saw a bunch of cool people whom I rarely see except at Eric's new year's
party, and got a visit from Rachel and Vasilios, who graciously drove for
hours and hours.
I did a countdown program in Python, using Tkinter. It's normally done
with HyperCard, but Eric couldn't get HyperCard running right away, so
I tried out Tkinter. I have to admit that I don't know an enormous amount
of Tkinter, but it's pretty straightforward to get started with it. The
most difficult part is probably the geometry management and packing
stuff.
We thought we might be able to get the countdown to start a fire (as we'd
hoped in previous years) -- lighting a candle, for example. Unfortunately,
I couldn't get my solid-state relay to trigger from my laptop's parallel
port, and I didn't have a voltmeter or LEDs or anything else to use for
debugging purposes. So the computer control was out this year. We did try an
experiment later on to see about the possibility of igniting something
with electricity. Our experimental result is this: if you connect eight
9-volt batteries in series (which is very easy to do because of how the
connectors are designed), a fairly large spark is produced by the 72-volt
potential across the resulting gap when battery leads are brought close
together. This spark is sufficient to ignite a small piece of cardboard
wetted with 91% isopropyl alcohol.
A much simpler technique would be to get a thin wire like those used in
cigarette lighters in cars, and connect this to a relatively small DC
voltage. The wire should become hot enough to ignite things (like
cigarettes). There is some detail about matching the internal resistance
of the power source in order to maximize the power dissipated through
the wire.
The theory here is pretty simple. Suppose that we want to cause heat by
connecting a wire in series with a battery. Assume that the battery's
total voltage is V, and the internal resistance of this source is Rs, the
resistance of the wire is Rw. Then the total series
resistance is Rs+Rw, current I=V/(Rs+Rw), power in the wire
Pw=I*Vw=V^2*Rw/(Rs+Rw)^2. I did take dPw/dRw by hand (I'm ashamed to
say it's the first derivative I've taken in a year or two), and
found it to be V^2[(Rs+Rw)^2-2Rw(Rs+Rw)]/(Rs+Rw)^2, which has a zero
when Rs=Rw. This implies that the wire will become hot most quickly
when its resistance is exactly equal to the internal resistance of the
battery.
(In that case, of course, the battery will also dissipate power at
the same rate as the wire, so the battery may become rather hot as
well.)
There's a much more general result, or technique, known to
electrical engineers, and it's called
impedance
matching. I never got far into alternating currents in my
physics class, so I didn't learn too much detail about impedances.
I'm glad I got to be here for the new year. I'll be back in
California soon.
Happy new year!
I'm headed back to San Francisco.
After celebrating the new year in Hopedale, I took the commuter rail back
to Boston, accessed a wireless network near MIT, and had more tea at
Tealuxe in Harvard Square.
I'm reading The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
by Bill Bryson, which Riana gave me recently. It's hilarious! There's
something incredibly amusing about historical linguistics, especially
accounts of changes in usage.
Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something
very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy.
Brave once implied cowardice -- as indeed bravado
still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.)
Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of
praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise,
was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original
pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble
once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once
a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person,
whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin
root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means
virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a
sinister word (perhaps it still is), while obsequious and
notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter
notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called
it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was
pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
(pp. 77-8)
There are lots of other funny parts. I liked the description of the
Oxford English Dictionary (now discussed at great length
in The Professor and the Madman). Bryson says that the
famous dictionary insists oddly
that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining
at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it
grudgingly acknowledge that the commonest spelling "is perh.
Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)
When I read what
Lessig
wrote this morning about the Supreme Court's decision in Eldred v.
Ashcroft today, I thought of what Rabbi Joshua says in
Avot D'Rabbi Nathan when he sees the ruins of the Temple:
oi lanu al ze she-hu charev!
(Alas for us that it is ruined!)
Rabbi Nathan goes on to report that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (Rabbi Joshua's teacher)
answers "b'ni, al yera l'cha" (my son, do not grieve). I hope Professor
Lessig's teachers are even now writing to him: b'ni, al yera l'cha.
Yochanan ben Zakkai argues specifically that Rabbi Joshua need not grieve
because there are alternatives to the Temple service
("yesh lanu capara acheret", "we have another
atonement"). What is Eldred supporters' "capara acheret"?
Surely it starts with cultural struggle to show people that
the public domain, and all the public's rights in copyright,
are valuable;
that, as the Eldred dissents recognized, the copyright
law properly aims at a public rather than a private end;
that
no
one is intrinsically entitled to property rights in creative work;
that, as Professor Litman argues, legislation by private negotiation is
not serving the public;
and that copyright significantly burdens expression, and that the fair use
doctrine may not always be adequate to remedy the harm.
The capara acheret is also to support all the people who
are working on the accessibility of culture, from librarians in
libraries through free software programmers through "vernacular
archivists" (as Stewart Brand says) and the creators and
operators of the "databases" so celebrated by Justice Breyer's dissent.
And its includes supporting technologists who make creative work
easier and cheaper.
It is odd that so many people should feel so comfortable with a
tax -- the retroactive part of the extension -- solely to the
benefit of heirs and assignees, where the creators of the famous
works at issue are typically dead and buried.
Id cinerem aut manis credis curare sepultos?
(Aeneid IV, 34)
If you're feeling depressed about the Eldred decision, a little
proofreading might cheer you up.
Having seen Larry Lessig argue this cause
is one of the highlights of my life.
EFF has started publishing
Cruelty to Analog, which will
cover the activities of the ARDG.
If you use wavemon with an 802.11b
wireless network, you'll notice that signal quality is measured on a scale from 0 to 92,
and can be affected directly simply by bringing your hand near to your wireless
card. The closer your hand gets to the card, the poorer the signal quality will
become.
wavemon even has a mode in which a graph of signal quality over time is displayed.
While many people use that graph (and similar graphs in similar software) to help
find wireless networks, or physically locate base stations, or figure out the
best orientation for a laptop using a particular network, you can also just move your
hand up and down and watch the graph line go up and down as your hand moves.
This means that the 802.11 card can function as a rough proximity sensor for your hand.
This evening I realized that that means you can make a wireless card into a sort of
poor man's theremin -- you just need to map the signal strength to a tone, play the
tone, and move your hand. You'll be able to play several discrete pitches or
scales, although with much less precision than a real theremin.
I wrote a three-line shell script which implements this idea (using Linux setterm, all
on a beta test version of the LNX-BBC, it so
happens), and later improved it a little bit with a small C program which wraps the
Linux KIOCSOUND ioctl. It works just fine -- you can easily bring the tone up and down by
moving your hand back and forth. That's a lot of fun. The most obvious problem is the
discreteness of the whole thing. A real theremin is plainly an analog device. (The analogy
is between the pitch level and the position of your hand.) This system is very obviously
quantized, at best like someone playing a poor piano scale (and it's distorted sine waves
rather than piano strings with their nice harmonics).
We can't really do better with the standard 802.11 drivers, because they definitely
won't give anything more precise than the 92 discerete levels. You could modify
the hardware (and build a real theremin, which is far simpler electrically than
an 802.11b card). Another approach is to modify the way the tones are generated.
What I'm currently thinking is something like this: we need to define a function
i(s) and a function n(g, p), where i(s) is the ideal pitch in Hz corresponding
to a signal strength measurement s and where n is the next pitch after some
small constant time step if the goal is to reach pitch g and we're currently
playing pitch p. So we use the function n to change pitch smoothly and always
move gradually from the pitch we're currently playing toward a goal. The goal,
at any given moment, will be i(s) -- that is, we do a loop like
p=i(signal_strength())
while 1:
play(p)
p = n(i(signal_strength()), p)
sleep(time_step)
Now the pitch will always change continuously, and yet the pitch will be
directly responsive to the (discrete) signal strength measurement. If
the signal strength rises quickly, the pitch will rise quickly. If
the signal strength rises slowly, the pitch will rise slowly. If the
signal strength stays constant, the pitch will stay constant. If you
move the position of your hand to a position x centimeters away from the
card at one time, and later move it to the same position, the pitch
should in each case approach roughly the same value -- which should be
i(s) Hz for whatever value of s happens to correspond to holding your hand
x cm away from the card.
(There might not be a unique such value, because it also depends on a
lot of other factors like the angle at which you hold your hand.
Obviously there is lots and lots of radio hardware which would give
you much better results -- maybe even an ordinary AM or FM radio
if you tweaked the demodulation circuit and gave it a suitable
input signal. But there's not lots of radio hardware you can get
so easily if you're not a radio expert and get a single digital
value out of so readily and at such a high frequency. We can
hope GNU Radio will change this situation quickly!)
My little theremin script is
apparently
even famous in Italy. It has been published by
Linux Journal.
Some minor changes are useful, so I'll try to pass them along to Don.
On the ferry on Thursday, I happened across a discarded copy of the New
York Times which happened to be open to
an
article about my colleague Fred von Lohmann. This was totally
co-incidental -- I wasn't looking for the article or anything.
On Friday, I had the honor of meeting
Whitfield Diffie.
I'm sorry I'm still so far behind in posting news from the past month or
so. I think I'll be able to catch up soon. I've read two novels I
haven't even mentioned here yet! (Well, one novel and one "romance".)
Hey, did you know that "romance novel" and "Romance language" have the
same etymology? (And it originally dates back to the Roman
language, which is even more obvious to English speakers in the French
word "roman".)
As I was walking to the Ashby BART station this morning, I saw through
someone's ground-floor window a wide-screen TV, left on in an empty
room and tuned to CNN. The picture was showing the Columbia
re-entry over and over again. "Oh, I forgot to watch that," I thought.
It was supposed to have been visible from California very early in
the morning. But I wondered why CNN would keep showing the same
re-entry image. A caption, which was very difficult to read, said that
the space shuttle had broken up over Texas on re-entry.
I didn't understand. The loss of a space shuttle was something
that happened in the 1980s. It was an iconic event of the 1980s;
"the Space Shuttle disaster" happened right before my sister was
born, right before the Chernobyl disaster. And then Richard
Feynman investigated it.
Now "the Space Shuttle disaster" is something this decade has to
share with the 1980s, as when World War II came along and people
had to adjust to seeing "the Great War" in a different context.
But I don't know how I can think of a Space Shuttle disaster
apart from the Challenger.
When I walked on to BART I thought about what John F. Kennedy,
one of the most eloquent of all U.S. presidents, famously said a
long time before I was born:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this
decade and do the other things,
not because they
are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve
to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because
that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are
unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others,
too.
It's interesting to have
govenment officials whose job includes opposing the government's policies.
I guess public defenders are in some sense in the same position. The
Canadian Privacy Commissioner's report is rather stirring reading.
I went with several other people to see Sumana's performance in the
Apollo Amateur Night.
It was
horrifying -- not her performance, but the behavior of the audience.
They were encouraged to boo, and they took full
advantage of their power. Even the Golden Overtones were booed off the
stage before they got underway. If you've ever heard the Overtones, you
know this is a great absurdity.
There was an incredibly self-confident gospel rapper
(Ashlei
Williams) who seemed talented
but whose lyrics I found impossible to understand. She didn't get
booed at all. I know of three theories about this. One is that she was
young and people were asked not to boo young performers. Another is that
she spoke quickly and left no pauses in which booing could build up.
The last -- endorsed by the Amateur Night's host -- was that she was
religious, and most of the audience either endorsed her message or
felt uncomfortable about booing an expression of somebody's religious
beliefs. She was definitely not a "cultural" gospel singer; she was
more of a "win souls for the Lord" gospel singer.
The students were discoursing glibly (as my
example had instructed them) about some matter or other -- the
intricacies of Milton's verse, or the import of his allusions to
Virgil -- and I without thinking burst out, "No, no, he doesn't want your
admiration; he wants your soul!"
(Stanley Fish; also reprinted in his The Trouble With Principle)
Hearing the gospel rap (and the host's claim that nobody would want
to boo God) set my mind wandering back through the question of
counterevangelism -- we could ask both why there is an impulse to
counterevangelism and why that impulse is considered rude or immature.
One of many interpretations of Socrates is that he behaved
counterevangelically, insisting that many charismatic founders of schools
did not know whereof they spoke and were unworthy of belief. The execution
of Socrates would then suggest that counterevangelism was not especially
popular.
Remind me to tell the story of the trilemma picket.
Anyway, the behavior of the audience prevented us from hearing Sumana's
act. Fortunately, she performed it for us privately a little later on.
Unfortunately, The Golden Overtones didn't grant us the same privilege.
I just had an article about the broadcast flag published in print in
the March issue of Linux Journal (in a prominent position).
Zack has an article in the same issue. Take a look when the issue
reaches newsstands. It doesn't seem to be on-line anywhere, though
I expect to have a somewhat expanded version of the same article
on-line soon. This is probably the first time I've been published
in a national magazine. Well, credited, anyway.
Why did NASA appoint a committee on Saturday to investigate the Columbia
disaster? To prevent the president from appointing one, I imagined. It
looks like
it worked:
The White House said Bush was not pushing for a presidential
commission to study the tragedy because he is satisfied with the
makeup of a panel appointed by O'Keefe, which largely consists of
military officers, Fleischer said.
No Feynman. Very possibly no
Appendix F.
I'm snowed in! I'm in Washington, D.C., and I can't get home because
of this amazing snowstorm.
The Washington area's Baltimore-Washington International and Reagan
National airports both closed until further notice; BWI had a record
13 inches of snow by evening with more to come, National Weather
Service Meteorologist Steve Zubrick said.
"If these accumulations actually occur, this storm would rank in the
top five of all storms in snowfall recorded in the last century,"
Zubrick said.
Dulles International Airport had just one runway open during the
afternoon.
(Associated Press)
It's been coming down really hard for about 24 hours, and the road
conditions are just terrible.
I got home safely. I was supposed to come home Sunday, but I came home
Tuesday because of the storm. The Metro
was running very infrequently on Tuesday. But on Monday, it wasn't
running above ground at all. When I called up ground transportation
providers on Monday to ask about the prospect of getting to the airport, they
started to laugh at me. So I came back Tuesday instead.
It was quite a storm.
Nobody should think
that
free software DTV demodulation is not real, because it's very real.
It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math
available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.
EFF filed
reply
comments, and so did many other organizations. I'll try to get a good
list up at Consensus at Lawyerpoint
soon.
I was
quoted in
the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on
Microsoft Palladium (now called Microsoft NGSCB).
On Wednesday, we had a conference call with Microsoft and had a briefing
about a new technology Microsoft plans to announce next week. I hope to
write something about it as soon as possible.
More sentences I'd never uttered before: "So, how does this relate to
section III.J of your
consent decree
with the Department of Justice?"
Ed Felten pointed to a
fascinating LawMeme article on the subject of the privacy
interests of e-mail users -- not against search and seizure, but against
ordinary Internet users who forward things indiscriminately. It's a good
read and thought-provoking.
There seems to be a whole genre of thought-provoking articles of the
form "our experience of the Internet contains a vacuum with regard
to legal and social norms around ________, as was dramatically
revealed by this singular event". (Variants include "how should our
everyday off-line intuition and institutions map to the Internet
world? -- a question highlighted by this singular event" or "the
Internet is really maturing and becoming an important and complicated
part of everyday life, because now Internet users even have to deal
with problems such as _______, as was dramatically demonstrated by
this singular event".) Maybe the most influential piece in this
genre is "A
Rape in Cyberspace". These essays used to be more common than
they are today. They rarely propose any kind of conceptual solution
to the problem or conundrum they explore. They are not useless.
Even long-time, sophisticated Internet users haven't thought about
all the gaps between kinds of experience.
The good thing is that the "et in Arcadia" ("et in
Cyberia"?) pieces have gotten a bit less breathless and
gee-whiz. They take for granted that there is this network,
and it's useful, and people actually use it and rely on it.
Maybe that evolution is helpful. There are conflicting influences
about this. Remind me to write about the old days of
Wired.
(That's the Douay-Rheims version of a passage from the Catholic
apocrypha, which is
inscribed on
a Catholic church in San Francisco's Chinatown.)
Last week I bought a watch, and I became a member of the
ACLU and the
FSF.
I hadn't had a wristwatch for about three years, since my watchstrap
broke. It's a great feeling to have one again; I'm trying to get used
to actually knowing what time it is.
I'd delayed joining ACLU for many years because I disagreed with them
about
affirmative
action (though I agreed with them about almost every other issue they
work on). But when I read about some recent events (I have an unfinished
diary entry about this), I thought that I really needed to join the ACLU.
So I did.
It's pretty well known that ACLU membership is booming.
Troubling times and events tend to increase their membership numbers -- a
phenomenon we're familiar with at EFF. (If I remember correctly, more people
joined EFF the week Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested than any other week that
year.)
Suppose you are a station attached to an unswitched Ethernet segment
through which traffic is passing. You don't have an IP address.
You can't get one through DHCP, because either there is no DHCP
server or there is one, but it isn't configured to give your
station an IP address.
The network has no access control (which is pretty obvious when we
say "attached to an unswitched Ethernet segment") and it has a
default gateway which is willing to route IP traffic to and from
the Internet for all local machines with IP addresses appropriate
for the local segment.
By observing local traffic on the segment (and perhaps by making
non-destructive active probes), how can you identify the gateway's
IP address and a valid but unused IP address for yourself (and,
preferably, the IP address of a name server which will perform
recursive queries on your behalf), and so autoconfigure yourself
as an IP node on the network without the benefit of DHCP service?
I think I know a solution to this problem, which I call the
"Ethernet mimicry" problem. The short way of phrasing the problem
is "how can you autoconfigure yourself on a network which won't
give you an address with DHCP"? I talked to Anirvan about this
a couple of weeks ago and worked out an approach I think would
work.
I talked about this with Dan Kaminsky at CodeCon. He seems more
likely than I to be able to implement it. The basic parts of
the solution include an ability to recognize gateways (they
receive traffic not addressed to them and send traffic not
originated by them, whereas ordinary machines receive traffic
not originated by them and send traffic not addressed to them)
and an ability to tell whether a particular IP address is in
use on a local segment (by sending ARP queries for it -- a
capability apparently already included in the current MacOS
and used when you try to set an IP address manually).
When we told Kragen about this, he revealed that he'd already
invented it. Oops!
I had a great time at CodeCon over the weekend. I saw an
exciting GNU Radio demo, heard about a lot of other interesting
work (Dan Kaminsky's Paketto Keiretsu, for example), and had some
neat conversations with people. I got to hang out with Robyn Wagner
(now "Esq."!) and Lucky Green, and play a bit of Scrabble with the
former. I also saw Ben Laurie, visiting from far away, and talked
with him and Raph Levien about a lot of interesting issues.
I went to dinner with an extremely geeky group on the first
evening of the conference, and got to ask them a question about
attacks on watermark detectors. The group came up with a great
solution, which I might write up as a
Cruelty to Analog post
or try to publish as a paper. I also heard a lot about capability
systems and (as on other days of the conference) found myself
repeatedly impressed by how eclectic the interests of many
programmers turn out to be.
The best part of CodeCon might well have been the opportunities
for conversation with such a fascinating group of people. It was
a really good conference.
I passed up an opportunity to go snowshoeing in the mountains
in order to attend CodeCon, but I still ended up completely
exhausted at the end of it.
Microsoft announced its Rights Management Server (or Rights
Management Services, which is the platform the Rights Management
Server is part of) last week, two days after telling us about it
in a conference call. I'm writing something up about this, which
I'll publish at my EFF site shortly (and link to from here).
Everyone is finding it amusing, or peculiar, that Microsoft
now has a DRM product called
RMS. While the
capabilities and architecture of Microsoft RMS aren't
precisely the same as Richard's depiction, there is some overlap with
the functionality of the system
described
in Richard's 1997 science fiction story about digital rights
management, published before the concept was widely known
or widely implemented. (I think the story is better
without the "Author's Note", but maybe that's just because
I'm following DRM pretty closely. That story might be part
of the inspiration for Kathryn Myronuk's clever slogan "Reading
is a right, not a feature", which I've been quoting in e-mail
since a little after Dmitry was arrested.)
What English word has six consonants in a row?
I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal
about Microsoft Rights Management Services (subscription required,
but the text is available in the Cryptography mailing list archive)
An employee, for example, might be ordered to do something illegal in an e-mail
that effectively self-destructs. "If the person doesn't do the thing, he can be
fired," Mr. Schoen said. "If he wants to prove the boss had asked him to do
something illegal, there is no record of it."
and in the L.A. Times I was quoted
about the ARDG
Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Federation, a group that
advocates civil liberties online, said the 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act puts the burden on Hollywood to protect its programs.
But the studios' anti-piracy initiatives would shift the burden onto
manufacturers so that "whenever you make anything technical, you have
to go and ask them, 'How do I design this so that it protects your
interests?'"
I saw Brian LaMacchia at the
Berkeley DRM
conference today and got to talk to him a little more about Microsoft
RMS. I commended him on admitting the existence of attacks against
Microsoft's DRM, something many other DRM vendors refuse to
do. (Whenever I talk to a Microsoft technologist about a Microsoft DRM
technology and propose an attack, the technologist always replies "Yup,
that attack would work!"; do you know any other DRM vendor who'll react
that way?)
Mr. Rogers died today; he was 74.
Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My
whole approach in broadcasting has always been "You are an important
person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions." Maybe
I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a
person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a
healthy way, is important.
(Fred Rogers, March 20, 1928-February 27, 2003, quoted in Sony Corp.
of America v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984), n. 27
(citations omitted))
I've long wondered what he meant by his proviso "in a healthy way";
I ought to have written to ask him. It reminds me of Locke's
proviso:
Whatsoever, then, he removes
out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath
mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own,
and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the
common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something
annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this
"labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but
he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where
there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
(John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, para. 26)
What they have in common is that it's very easy to remember the
general statement and to forget about the proviso or qualification.
For Mr. Rogers, it was "in a healthy way"; for Locke, it was "where
there is enough, and as good left in common for others". It's
hard to imagine that either man would have wanted us to pass idly
by his qualification. To Mr. Rogers, "in a healthy way" would surely
have been a central part of his message.
I remember when Mr. Rogers ate some tapioca pudding on his show,
because one of his neighbors had shared it with him. I was really
jealous because Mr. Rogers got to have tapioca pudding, and I
(at home) didn't get any. I thought Mr. Rogers was really lucky
to have such friendly neighbors who wanted to give him tapioca
pudding. But he was lucky in more ways than that; he was lucky to
have the opportunity to help interpret the world to generations of
young people.
Another time he asked his cameraman to turn the camera around and
show us the studio (with its lights, cameras, scaffolding, and
staff members). That was a shock; it was fascinating and horrifying;
it was generous and courageous; it was a frame-breaking experience
which set me up to enjoy Hofstadter and, maybe, in a small way, to
weather other disillusionments.
I once wrote a fan letter to Mr. Rogers (long before I'd heard of
the Betamax doctrine or knew that I had him to thank for it). I
drew him a terrible picture of a fish and told him that I loved
his show. He wrote back, thanking me effusively, and included a
drawing of his own (a caboose, if I remember correctly, drawn
with somewhat greater artistic skill).
Now sweatered Rogers, each and every day,
Was kind and gentle -- "in a healthy way".
He'll come no more on the T.V.:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
We'll miss you, Mr. Rogers.
Early this morning, Quinn
gave birth to
her daughter Ada. Congratulations to Quinn and her
family!
As you can see from the link above, Quinn and her family decided
to post frequent updates during the experience, and
nearly
instantaneous baby pictures of Ada.
I'm guessing I'm sick. I've been exhausted and a little dizzy for about
a week, and there's a flu going around EFF (but my symptoms seem pretty
different from anybody else's).
I got to go to the Berkeley DRM conference and Stanford spectrum
conference (thanks to the organizers of each). They were very
interesting, and I got my first glimpse of Marybeth Peters.
I also got to see Aaron Swartz and
Bob Frankston, the latter
preaching his very seductive gospel of connectivity.
Why, Bob asks, are CD sales down?
Because of Internet piracy! answers a hypothetical recording executive.
No, says Bob, because of cell phones. People used to buy CDs for
entertainment while they were going somewhere, in a car or while
walking around. Now they would rather talk to friends. If they have
the ability to talk to friends, they find that more interesting than
listening to somebody else.
Everyone nods.
Also at the spectrum conference, Judge Alex Kozinski served on a moot
court panel and kept explaining that "property owners are very grabby".
I think I've understood the so-called "spectrum commons" argument (which
may be misnamed), and I'm trying to write something up about it.
Even if you have a cell phone, which I don't, it's still worth buying
a music CD now and then, at least if the CD is by Dar Williams.
Ben took me out to Borders in Union Square, where Dar Williams was
performing and signing copies of her new CD The Beauty of the
Rain. We each bought a copy and got it signed (and got to talk to
Dar for about a minute).
Far and away the best song is "The One Who Knows", which is
just lovely. (I would hold it up with "How Can I Help You To Say
Goodbye?" by Patti Loveless, which has a sadder perspective on a related
theme.) "The Beauty of the Rain" is pretty good too. In general, I
don't think this CD is as consistently good as The Green World,
which was a great triumph.
The Free Software Foundation has shipped its LNX-BBC-based membership
cards! All of us at the LNX-BBC
project are very proud.
If you join the FSF, you
can get one. Even
Jon
Johansen is an LNX-BBC user!
In a profile of Ed Felten, Jack Valenti says:
What does breaking the code have to do with research? Research for
what? Are you researching cloning, or the laws of physics? We're not
dealing with Boyle's Law here . . . we're dealing with trying to
protect a piece of property, a feature film, from being illegally
stolen.
I gave the 15th anniversary address at
SVLUG, which is odd, because Linux
is only 12 years old. My talk was called "The Empire Strikes Back:
Constraining Free Software Development" (a title partly due to
Eben Moglen), and Biella,
Praveen, and Riana came out to hear me along with about a hundred
other people.
Several people in the audience were "TV people" and were quite
familiar with the issues surrounding ATSC. It was funny afterward
to hear one of them complain to the others about what a bad idea it
had been to add color to NTSC.
I used
MagicPoint for my talk. I was
a little annoyed by MagicPoint's handling of line wrapping, but in
general it seems like a convenient way to do a presentation with free
software. It would probably be difficult for people to tell that
it's not PowerPoint.
Who knows a convenient way to convert an ATSC transport stream to
something more readily displayed by common PC software? Would you
use
HDTVtoMPEG2?
I got diagnosed with something called viral labyrinthitis, a kind of
inner ear infection. Some web sites suggest that it can cause
permanent damage, but my symptoms are a lot milder than what those
sites describe, and the doctor predicted I'd feel better next week
(hopefully in time for the IETF
meeting).
Via Electrolite:
veterans try to explain what war is like.
When I saw Bowling for Columbine, I felt sick and had to leave.
I felt almost the same way reading that article.
I'm still sick with my viral labyrinthitis. I'm tempted to read Borges
in honor of it.
I missed a
protest march
because I'm still sick.
I read three stories by Borges -- "The House of Asterion", "Ibn-Hakam
al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth", and "The Two Kings and the
Two Labyrinths" -- on account of my labyrinthitis.
I'm still sick. I've been sick for almost two weeks. I wish I'd get
better soon.
Riana came to visit and played Boggle with me, which cheered me up a
bit. I spent an hour at the
IETF meeting,
but found it difficult because I continued to feel dizzy. There's a
lot I'd like to hear and see at the IETF this week, so I hope I hold
out.
Even when I'm sick, I'm a pretty good Boggle player.
I signed up for EMusic's service.
They have the right idea (no DRM, immediate downloads) but unfortunately
too few artists and tracks available. Obviously some of the bigger
labels, or publishers, or both, said something like "how can you
imagine putting tracks up for sale with no DRM?" [even though that's
what CDs are] or "how can you pay us such low royalties compared to
CD?" or just "why should we bother to sell things on-line?".
But EMusic, if only for respecting our
first sale
rights, deserves our support. (Beyond that, I'm starting to suspect
that they're exactly the way I would like to buy music -- except I'd
like it to be available in Ogg Vorbis
format too. They could offer MP3 and Ogg downloads side-by-side,
and give you a discount on your subscription if you chose Ogg downloads
instead of MP3. It's cheaper for them, because they don't have to
pay the MP3 royalties.)
I know over a dozen people who've said "I want to pay the artists, but
I want an immediate download of an unencrypted track, and only the
track I want". Maybe I know atypical people, but I know lots of people
who could make good EMusic customers.
Maybe I'll write to artists I like and suggest that they either offer
their own MP3 and Ogg sales or sign on with EMusic. (That's assuming
they don't have contracts with labels which would forbid that, which
is a huge and totally unwarranted assumption.)
I'm feeling a little better -- more tired than dizzy today -- and spent a
few hours at the IETF meeting (ipr and sip WGs). But when I told Helen
that I was sick, she said "I suggest reading a good fiction book", so
I took her advice and bought William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
at Borderlands and read it almost straight through.
I found the set-up much more exciting than the conclusion, but Gibson
is still an enthralling writer and didn't butcher the technology as
badly as he might have. The well-connected NSA agent in the trailer
part was a bit much, though.
Pattern Recognition has a properly blood-curdling (or
chilling) villain.
Even though my labyrinthitis may be on the way out, my arms have gotten
really sore again.
I ate lunch from Tu Lan during the break in the IETF meeting, and it
was delicious.
Cory takes me to task for suggesting yesterday that
EMusic needs to support Ogg
Vorbis. He argues that it would be more expensive for them in
various ways (including storage costs) and that they're unlikely
themselves to be paying any per-track royalties on MP3 downloads.
But in fact,
the MP3
patent licensors are charging a percentage royalty on "related
revenue" and EMusic could actually save money by allowing us
an Ogg Vorbis download option instead of MP3-only. (That's
assuming that the marginal cost of offering this option exceed
2% of their revenues, and that they can find an accounting model
which distinguishes "MP3-related" and "non-MP3-related" revenues
in their business.)
That 2% of related revenue would probably be defined as "reasonable
and non-discriminatory" by most standards bodies. As one person
commented in the ipr WG this morning, a little 2% here and 2%
there soon adds up to 50% (if you were using 25 technologies
with such patent claims against them).
I started to write a rant about patents here, and the collective
action problem, but really, in this particular case,
none of that is very relevant. Many existing businesses which
are paying the 2% MP3 tax can probably realize substantial
savings by the incremental step of offering Ogg downloads and
streams in parallel to their existing MP3 downloads
and streams. They don't have to stop offering MP3s. They can
pass some of the savings along to their customers. (E.g.,
for every Ogg you download, you earn credits which you can
redeem for extra bonus tracks.) If this were done, it could
provide a specific and totally non-ideological way that Oggs
could become appealing to random music fans, which would also
facilitate support for the format in players.
Only a few people, like Ed Felten and Larry Lessig, have been able to
communicate particularly effectively with "outsiders" about what is
at stake in the current copyright wars. And even they, when they give
speeches, are mostly addressing people who already have at least a
passing interest.
Fritz Attaway testified last week that most people would not even
notice if the broadcast flag mandate were adopted. While I question
this (I think they would feel the impacts, but not know to attribute
them to the mandate, any more than most DMCA opponents know to blame
Bruce Lehman for that statte), I do sense a serious division between,
say, slashdot readers and the general public, or LawMeme readers
and the general public, or Freedom to Tinker readers and the general
public, or Crypto-Gram readers and the general public.
This was a gap that Cindy Cohn bridged, and everyone working with her
bridged, with great success in the Bernstein litigation: even though
the "general public" was not thereby enlightened, some corners of the
Federal judiciary were enlightened, with extremely remarkable
results.
Do you remember when operating system distributors in the U.S. didn't
bundle PGP and SSH? I do -- it was five years ago. Thanks, Cindy!
Meanwhile, and famously, the entertainment industries are seizing a
vast control over the kind of technology that's readily available to
the general public. (Fritz explained at the Berkeley DRM conference
that that was all the control they expected to be able to get.) At
the same time, people who oppose this are spending hours and hours
talking to each other. I'm doing that right this moment. I'm
writing a complaint about what Bruce Lehman did to free expression,
what he did to free software, what he did to research, and, as
Will Rodger observed, what has happened to "intellectual honesty"
about technology.
Not only will Bruce Lehman never read this complaint, but this
complaint can never be expected to be interesting to anyone outside
a circle of people who are already mad at Bruce Lehman.
I have a skepticism of the approach that grounds outreach in
"consumer expectations", partly because, as Fred observed, we can't
expect in detail things that haven't been invented yet, else they would
have been. What we mean by "innovation" is that something we can't
identify and haven't experienced is going to be found and is going
to be of interest to us -- a peculiar faith indeed, and more surprising
than the monument "to the Unknown God".
There are deeper reasons to be concerned about "consumer expectations",
and the deepest of these is that they are so malleable. If CEA were
to spend a billion dollars on TV advertising to say that you ought to
expect to be able to do something, a lot of people would expect to
be able to do it. Conversely, without marketing, or in the presence
of a sufficiently clever campaign in the other direction, it would
never occur to most people that they could "expect" to be able to do
the things that new technologies could in principle enable.
In fact, this situation is constantly present outside of the copyright
wars. We can do lots of things that we don't do, and there are
constantly enormous struggles to redefine "normal" in people's minds.
I'm alternately encouraged and terrified by the power of culture
and popular opinion, since the world and human civilizations could
logically be so different from what they are today.
As I was recently discussing with Rob Hamadi, and as Whit Diffie
pointed out last year, we have expectations based on prior
experience, but that doesn't really constitute an independent
standard for anything. If we've been exposed to a particular
lifestyle or technology, we may consider it normal and
appropriate; if we haven't, we may not know what we're missing.
If Universal City Studios had prevailed against Sony, the world
and culture might have been poorer, but there probably wouldn't
have been riots in the streets. (This is one of the frustrations
of MPAA's argument that the popularity of DVD proves anything.
As a technical matter, we could have had things much, much
more capable and flexible; as a legal matter, we may yet
someday. Already, implementers like the Videolan team in France
are demonstrating some of the innovation which is possible outside
the constraints of a DVD CCA license. But there are no riots
against DVD CCA -- just a few small pickets -- because most people
are usually prepared to choose the path of least resistance in
the marketplace.)
And all this gets back to the observation about the gap, the gap
which means that only people who already agree with me (or maybe
one or two who are paid to disagree) are likely ever to read
these paragraphs at all. I'm reminded of something I've quoted
a number of times before:
Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac
domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec
caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam
celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam
potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in
ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas
eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut
nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim
obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a
quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."
(Cicero, de Re Publica, VI, 20)
The key part of Cicero's image for me is the "raris et angustis
in locis, quasi maculis, vastas solitudines interiectas [esse]",
that they live in isolated and narrow places, practically spots
on the face of the Earth, and vast deserts stretch between them.
So we have human habitation reduced to little dots on a ball.
Practically pinpricks on the surface of a ball.
Demographically, that's not quite true, if it ever was, and
physically now we have the ability
to come across the cosmos in a little under an hour (well,
almost!). We can even
read the regular commentary of an
Iraqi living in Baghdad. But how many people are doing that?
I have this strong sense of a general lack of outreach and a general
insularity -- maybe I should say "macularity". We have the technical
infrastructure to talk to millions of people,
but somehow
lack the means of getting their attention.
I went and spent hours two weeks ago giving a detailed presentation
about tech mandates at SVLUG,
which may have been useful in the sense that many people in the
audience may have been able to do something with that information,
but I suspect every single one of them already opposed tech mandates
and anticircumvention and already knew what both of those things
are. If I walked down the street in the Mission, could I find
anyone (except that one guy in a Debian t-shirt over there) who
knows what anticircumvention is or even what the difference between
a copyright, a patent, and a trademark is?
Fritz is right to say that people in that situation won't know the
broadcast flag is there, but wrong to suggest that they won't be
affected by it.
In the past, I've thought that it's a serious problem simply that
technical skills are today such an unusual and specialized thing
to possess -- and that the concepts of programming and communications
technology are not yet public knowledge. I've been influenced by
the "literacy" metaphor to say that today we have a problem in that
most Americans know how to read and write English but not yet how
to read and write computer software. And there is in principle
no reason to believe today that people who can be taught to read
English cannot be taught to read Python. There are just enormous
practical barriers to actually making this happen.
Most of these barriers are themselves cultural, not physical. In
other times and places, people have learned skills which are much
more different from what they routinely learn here and now than is
computer programming! In Soviet Russia, the level of understanding
of mathematics and physics demanded of ordinary students -- and, as
far as I can tell at this tremendous remove, actually exhibited by
them -- was astonishing.
But of course, it's one thing to insist that 70% of Americans, or
Chinese, could be literate enough to write their own computer software
(or that 70% of some population could be literate enough to write
their own letters) and another thing to try to imagine how that kind
of literacy could actually be developed, and exactly what else we would
have to give up to make it happen. I could try to start teaching a
weekend class, which, absent some kind of incredible marketing
genius, would presumably attract exactly those children who
already self-identify as technical. Perhaps they would
be the proverbial "low-hanging fruit", and perhaps that means that
this is exactly the right idea as a first step.
I do have a fear, which I've expressed many times here, that as
long as programming is seen as esoteric, difficult, magical, and
to be performed only by specialists, there will never develop a
relationship to technology which makes it a subject of useful
substantive discussion rather than nervous jokes by most people.
And as long as software is seen as a commodity, delivered in a
box and opaquely, it will never be widely recognized as speech
deserving useful first amendment protection even if someone's
economic interests are at risk. It seems essential to me that
there should be a broad transformation in which harnessing the
remarkable power of computing to any individual's purposes be
made just as routine, and just as insisted upon, as
literacy in natural languages.
Then we could forget, as programmers all seem to have forgotten,
that spoken language predated written language, or that written
language was a product of someone's conscious effort; we could
rediscover these things, and be astonished by them, and speculate
on their implications.
I would welcome other people's suggestions on what might be
possible either to promote any of these transformations or to
try to deal with the macularity problem and stop everyone from
preaching to the choir all the time. Wars ought to be a
sobering reminder that a failure of effective communication
doesn't just mean bad political outcomes at the ordinary scale,
with a loss of freedom that you can nonetheless survive -- it
means children torn into little pieces in front of their
families, prisoners raped and tortured, and everyone nearby
breathing poisons even if only conventional weapons are used.
It means the original sense of collateral damage: not
lawful copying prevented in the pursuit of suppressing unlawful
copying, but civilians blown up in the pursuit of destroying
military targets. And all that means, as Cindy would be quite
literally the first person to remind me, that how many people learn
to program is not the most important issue in the world.
After over four weeks of being sick, I'm finally starting to feel
better.
I've had a lot of strange dreams while I've been sick. A few days ago,
I had a dream which involved attending something at the Ninth Circuit.
I woke up from the middle of that dream, and, half-asleep, wondered
if the dream would pick up where it left off if I were to go back to
sleep.
The answer came to me: "No, silly! You can't just fall asleep and go
directly to the Ninth Circuit! Your dream has to start out in the
District Court, and then you have to appeal it."
I saw the Custom Made Theatre Company's
production of Animal Farm. In the program appeared this
quotation:
You must understand, sir, a person is either with this court or
he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is
a sharp time, now, a precise time -- we live no longer in the
dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled
the world. Now, by God's grace, the shining sun is up, and them
that fear not light will surely praise it. I hope you will
be one of those.
(Arthur Miller, The Crucible)
Somehow I feel like this is a quotation worthy of being letterpress-printed
on fine paper and framed, in a typeface with serifs. If I were in touch
with Willow and Willow had access to a press, I might ask her -- she did
the beautiful "quæcumque enim scripta sunt ad nostram doctrinam
scripta sunt" which hangs on my wall, and even thought to use the
ligature "æ" instead of "ae".
Custom Made chose to set Animal Farm in America instead of
England, so that the revolutionary song was "Beasts of America" instead
of "Beasts of England", and the later anthem "Animal Farm" ("never
through me shalt thou come to harm") was sung to the tune of "The
Star-Spangled Banner"!
They may have been reminded of the Arthur Miller quotation by a piece
Arthur Miller wrote in the New York Times on February 23
in which he quoted his own play.
I saw The Hours in Oakland with Sunah. It was beautiful
and very, very sad.
I'm a sucker for parallel-lives and parallel-worlds movies. I wrote
about that a while ago (giving examples like Run Lola Run
and Sliding Doors). I love that device: you could
probably make a really bad movie with a parallel-lives story, and I would
probably like it a lot anyway. But The Hours is not that bad
movie.
The biggest trouble with it that I know of is the portrayal of Vanessa
Bell. The movie seemed to make her out to be very superficial, and I
don't know why that should be.
We saw the movie at the Parkway in Oakland. Sunah wrote
What is great about the Parkway?
- you can sit on couches with a table by your side. you can order
pizza, nachos, coffee drinks, cookies and so forth and eat them in
the theater
- for some reason it is seldom crowded or smelly or noisy
- admission is only five dollars
- the owners/staff are nice people and they do this work because they
want to spread joy
All of this seemed to be true. The Parkway has a whole little
restaurant inside, so you can get dinner and a movie at the same
time.
I need to get out and explore more.
How far ahead of the unclassified world is the classified world?
By 1981 or earlier there was a whole classified literature on compromising
emanations, yet the unclassified world -- the "open literature" -- is only
starting to examine this subject in earnest now. (Wim van Eck's paper on
emanations was published in 1985, four years after that, but later FOIA
requests suggest van Eck's work only scratched the surface -- the state
of the military art was much broader than what van Eck referred to.)
British researchers
invented
public-key cryptography years before Diffie and Hellman (and also
figured out RSA before Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman). But the public
only found out about this recently, because the invention was
classified.
Civilians are starting to get
good satellite photos, but how
many years behind military spy satellites are they?
I've been to two incredibly good Japanese restaurants recently. I'd
been to each before, but the new visits reminded me of just how good
they are.
I went with Praveen to Ryowa Ramen (2068 University Avenue, Berkeley),
which has the best ramen I've ever had. (My fellow California loyalty
oath opponent Jimmer Endres introduced me to Ryowa.) And then I went
with Ren to Minako Organic Sushi (2154 Mission Street, San Francisco),
which has the best sushi I've ever had. My opinions on Japanese food
may be perceived as eccentric because I don't eat fish, and some people
can't imagine how you could have a proper opinion on Japanese food
without eating fish.
But actually, I think my first meal at Minako was the best meal I've
ever had -- from any cuisine.
Speaking of great restaurants, I also went with Praveen and friends
to the Indian Oven,
which has been rated as the best Indian restaurant in San Francisco.
It was also excellent, and I'm tempted to go there for my
birthday.
My ear infection is finally gone. That's a relief; I was feeling
sick for over four weeks, which contributed to the lack of diary
entries here. I'll try to get back in the habit of writing more
regularly.
Unfortunately, I'm having a lot of arm pain again. It's funny how
problems can seem to line up in series, so that they're experienced
one at a time (seriatim, as the Latin adverb-wielding
lawyers put it).
I visited Kragen and Beatrice
and tried out wedding cake (remember:
choose the strawberry!) and got to meet some of their friends and
make pirate jokes.
We had a meeting at the headquarters of
AC Transit in Oakland to
talk about privacy issues in the new TransLink system. If Lee
doesn't mind, I may publish some notes soon. Transit privacy is
an interesting issue which is becoming more so as more transit
operators accept more payments with stored-value instruments linked
to large databases.
I went to the RSA Conference and saw various people I knew, and got
to talk DRM with several interested strangers. I also had the
latest of my meetings with Microsoft on trusted computing, had an
informal meeting with AMD, and resolved to finish a paper on the subject.
In other RSA news, I got to ride a Segway scooter for the first time, thanks
to a company using it as a booth attraction. It is a wonderful
feeling. (I don't see it as a healthy replacement for a bicycle,
or a practical replacement for a car, but it's fun!)
Supposedly I'm going to get e-mail with a digital picture of myself
riding the Segway.
While I was in the South of Market, I dropped by a convenience store
where I used to shop, and bought a few things for old time's sake.
I told the owner about moving away from the South of Market area
because of the rents. During the boom, I told him, they tried to
increase our rent to $3,000 a month, or was it $4,000? The store
owner said he thought those rents were back down around $2,000 now.
It's sad to wander around there and see the CoffeeNet closed down
(and even painted white instead of purple, the only signs of its
former glory being some purple spots on the sidewalk where the paint
had dripped) and the Something
Wonderful gone, too.
I was astonished the other day by the following experience:
I booted an LNX-BBC test image and
started a test download of something using
BitTorrent.
BitTorrent was downloading into a RAM disk (actually a tmpfs, which is
kind of like a dynamically-sized RAM disk) with a maximum size of
about 128 MB.
I expected the download to run out of space at some point, since the file
I was trying to download was about 1 GB, much larger than the RAM disk.
After a little while, I went to check on it by looking at how much
disk space had been used.
The system said that only about 50 MB had been downloaded. Then I
remembered that BitTorrent preallocates space for the files it
downloads. I couldn't understand how the download had even been
able to start. The
BitTorrent
FAQ says that
BitTorrent pre-allocates the entire file when your download
begins, then writes in pieces in random order as it gets them.
As a result the file jumps to its full size immediately.
BitTorrent will tell you when the download is complete.
If this was the case, how could a BitTorrent download of a 1 GB
file even start on a 128 MB RAM disk? Furthermore,
how could the system claim that only 50 MB had been used?
My confusion was compounded when I went to look at the size of
the preallocated file, and ls reported it as occupying 1 GB.
Nick, who was visiting, explained that Unix supports sparse files
and a file's size in the filesystem may be substantially larger
than the amount of space it's actually taking up. When BitTorrent
allocates a complete file's size on a Unix filesystem, it will
only use a trivial amount of actual storage, and the amount of
storage used will increase as the download progresses.
I found this totally astonishing. I'm familiar with sparse files,
but I always thought they were a VMS thing and never realized
that they've been a standard part of Unix for a long time. I
don't know how I missed that.
The basic consequence of this is that the file size reported by
ls -l can be totally different from the file size reported by du.
Blocks not yet written will just not be allocated on disk, and
reading them will return zeroes.
Here are four problems:
- you have a collection of strings G which were generated by
some unknown formal grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
- you have a collection of strings G which were generated by some
unknown formal grammar and a collection F which could not be generated
by that grammar; find a formal grammar which generates them
- you have a formal grammar G and a string S; determine whether S
could have been generated by G
- you have a computer program P and a string S; determine whether,
for some input, S could have been generated by P
(Another twist is to replace "grammar" by "Unix regular expression" and
"generated by" with "matches".)
I would find these problems more straightforward to talk about if I had
taken a compilers course, or an automata course, but I never got that far
in CS. I did study formal languages only briefly, and I once read
Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, which
talks about the different classes of automata.
(1) and (2) are easy because you can just say that the grammar is
( string1 | string2 | string3 | string4 | ... ). This is a trivial
solution and not very useful -- it has no economy and no
predictive power. It's tantamount to saying that the laws
of physics are "All observed phenomena occur and all non-observed
phenomena are impossible". (What's amusing is that this isn't even
true, partly because some observed phenomena do not actually occur.)
It would be nice to have a more interesting solution.
(4) is as hard as the Halting Problem, but it is solvable for
some programs. You can see quickly that it isn't solvable
in general (even if you didn't know that the Halting Problem is
unsolvable and if you just had an intuition that there is no magical
way of solving all math problems with the same technique). You could
just write a program which verifies whether something is an
exception to some conjecture. If you can tell whether "yes" is ever
an output of that program, you can tell immediately whether the
conjecture is true.
(3) is pretty interesting, and it can actually be solved. The
regular expression version is a standard part of many programming
languages. The efficiency of a solution is also an interesting
question.
I regret that I didn't get to go on
this
hike, because it was beautiful.
The recordings on Out There Live are very good. Some of them
are better than the studio recordings on some other Dar Williams CDs.
I have to recommend this CD very highly.
I went to Stacey's with Zack, at the end of a fairly unsuccessful
series of errands.
I got the 2nd edition of Friedl's regular expression book from
O'Reilly, which might shed some light on my problem (3) above, in
that it discusses implementation issues related to RE matching.
Friedl's book is one of the most useful books ever published by
O'Reilly, but it's not particularly well-known. But it is a triumph.
I also got a Chomsky book on the Vietnam War because of the publisher's
successful attempt to suggest that it had a new relevance or resonance
today.
I also got a copy of Practical Cryptography, the latest in
the series of "Schneier books that criticize earlier Schneier books".
(So Bruce Schneier is like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cliff Stoll --
interesting company.)
"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you.
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or
like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward
you must throw the ladder away, because you discover
that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er
muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen,
sô er an ir ufgestigen . . . . Is that how you
say it?"
"That is how it is said in my language. Who told you
that?"
"A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I
forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody
one day to find that manuscript again. The only
truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown
away."
(Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose)
(Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem
er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht
er die Welt richtig.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
6.54)
I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist.
Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder,
although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and
demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to
that of a ladder.
(Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel")
If, like me, you hadn't noticed sparse files before, and you want to see a
large sparse file, do
#!/usr/bin/env python
foo = open("sparse", "w")
foo.write("sparse")
foo.seek(2 ** 30)
foo.write("file")
foo.close()
Codd's tuple-logic vision brings
"A world made of facts, and not of things";
And now he joins the ranks of history:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The Emerging
Man party in San Jose was among the geekiest events I
have ever attended, and naturally great fun.
Hooray for Emerging Man!
In a rare moment of good news on copyright law,
MusicCity and Grokster were held not to be subject to secondary liability for
copyright infringement based on their publication of file-sharing software;
the court reaffirmed the Betamax doctrine and recognized that software
publishers are like VCR
and photocopier manufacturers.
I worked on that case -- spending a whole day in a cage to protect others'
freedom -- but most of the credit on our side goes to our lawyers,
especially Fred von Lohmann. Congratulations!
I just met Ada Norton, and she is cute!
I had a great time seeing Alex,
with whom I worked on the Morpheus case when he was at
Wilson Sonsini and they were
co-counsel.
My father and my stepmother each just sent me a wonderful thing. My
father sent me my
grandmother's copy of a piano score for Mozart's Requiem.
("Klavier-Auszug", or "Piano excerpt".)
The publisher of that score, Edition
Peters/C.F. Peters Musikverlag, is still around, and still selling the
Requiem.
I have high-resolution scans of a few pages linked above, but here's a
lower-resolution version of the title page:
I like Mozart's Requiem a lot; people who know me might
recall that I named my computer after it! I never knew that my
grandmother liked it too.
I never really got to meet her, since she died when I was an infant.
She was a pianist. If she'd lived longer, maybe she would have
played music for me, or even taught me to play the piano.
My stepmother sent me a beautifully hand-decorated t-shirt.
The t-shirt includes a patch which reproduces a picture of me
from when I was eight and dressed up as the Rambam for a pageant.
It turns out that that was the first time I was ever photographed
with a beard!
(It's easy to find out
what the
Rambam looked like if you're curious. I didn't look a whole
lot like him -- more like an eight-year-old in a costume.)
My mom's putting on a major
Virginia Woolf
conference at Smith College in June -- it looks like a lot of
fun!
If you know any humanities fans or Western Massachusetts fans,
let them know.