So I went down to CPTWG in Los Angeles
today (March 3). According to Southwest's web site, it costs $97 each way
if you go down and back on March 3.
However, a round-trip with an overnight stay is much cheaper ($39
each way). If I went down on March 2 and back on March 3, or down
on March 3 and back on March 4, it would be $39 each way.
So Shari had asked "When is the next meeting?".
I booked a round-trip OAK-LAX flight leaving the morning of March
3 and returning the evening of April 14. I also got a round-trip
LAX-OAK flight leaving the evening of March 3 and returning the
morning of April 14.
So this morning, I flew out of Oakland on a long (over a month
long!) business trip. This evening, I flew out of Los Angeles
on a second long (over a month long!) business trip.
My business trips will run concurrently for over a month (as I
just said). Then, on the morning of April 14, I'll fly home to Los
Angeles from my trip to Oakland. That evening, I'll fly home to
Oakland from my trip to Los Angeles.
Sure enough, Southwest charged $39 per flight segment for the flights
I booked this way. But if I'd booked a pair of OAK-LAX round trips
(which would have me departing on the same physical airplanes at exactly
the same times on exactly the same dates), it would have been $97 per
flight segment, or up to $232 more.
I'm sure this trick has a name.
Cory and I had a lovely time recently meeting Charles Brownstein,
who runs the Comic Book Legal
Defense Fund. CBLDF (based in my hometown of Northampton,
MA!) is one of the country's recently founded civil liberties
organizations.
Well, OK, it's older than EFF. And like EFF, it's really stepped
up its litigation and membership efforts recently. The Fund and
ABFFE are the only non-profit
organizations I know that defend first amendment rights specifically
in a particular medium without also being an industry or trade
association. (I guess you can say EFF does the same for the
Internet. It's funny now to think of the Internet as a whole as
a "medium".)
Comics and video games are (like software, I might say) not most
people's prototypical examples of protected speech. (I'm thinking
in terms vaguely reminiscent of Lakoff here, but not in a
rigorous way.) Brownstein told me about many laws that are still
on the books that specifically target comics: some prohibit entirely
the depiction of particular subjects or points of view! A lot of
people have now heard about the extensive government and industry
censorship of comics earlier in this century, but it turns out that
some of the laws were never actually repeealed. Now the defense
of the video games and software will have to be left to others, but
you can do something for the comics by
making a donation
to CBLDF. It's a worthy cause.
I had minor surgery on my left big toe on Thursday of last week. (The
present discussion is about psychology and won't include any gory
details!)
One really remarkable result was that I had my first clear personal
experience of confabulation. Confabulation is a
term for the mind's creation of false-but-plausible explanations
for behavior, especially false memories that replace missing
memories.
For example, someone who's lost memories might make up other
memories to replace them (and then believe that the confabulated
memories were real). People who've suffered from some kinds of
paralysis, had split brain surgery, or (in a smaller number of
cases, as I understand it) people who've had amputations all
may sometimes confabulate explanations for how their body is
behaving. Someone will ask them why they did something, or
why they didn't do something, and so on. And the patients may
respond with a completely wrong story that they completely
believe. I don't have a good example of that, but I believe
Oliver Sacks and others have written about quite a few cases.
The other situation I know where people may confabulate is
posthypnotic suggestion. Supposedly people acting on or
influenced by posthypnotic suggestions will naturally come up
with rationalizations for their behavior that may have nothing
to do with hypnosis (and may not have been part of the
suggestion at all). But they don't think of themselves as
rationalizing at all. They think they're just providing
the correct explanation of what happened, of what they just
did. (Douglas Adams has a somewhat over-the-top example of
confabulation with hypnosis in one of his Dirk Gently books.)
My impression is that a key element of confabulation is that it is
seamless and unconscious. That is, a confabulator
isn't struggling to lie, or making any conscious effort to lie; and
the confabulation is indistinguishable from a true memory or
a correct explanation.
Here's how my confabulation went. My toe had been anesthetized with
a local anesthetic. When the procedure was over, I stood up and
started talking to Zack. I discussed with him whether or not I
could walk comfortably. "Well, I really don't want to put any weight
on my toe", I said. "I probably could, but I would rather keep all
my weight off it and keep holding it in the air."
Having said this, I looked down at my foot and found that my toe
was resting on the ground, and that I was already putting weight on
it. I had misinterpreted the anesthesia as a deliberate decision
on my part to hold my toe off the ground -- but of course I was
doing no such thing, and I had made no such deliberate decision.
In fact, I was standing perfectly normally. It was just the
anesthetic that prevented me from feeling any weight on the toe.
So I figured that if my toe felt like I was holding it off the
ground, it must be off the ground and I must have chosen to hold
it there.
Some people have suggested that most of our beliefs and most of
the things we say are confabulations, that confabulation is
actually our normal method of thinking.
We won Bunner again!
Oh, and we won Bunner again!
I love saying "We won Bunner". It's great that I get to say it all
the time, because it keeps happening. I'd better set up another
Bunner victory party soon.
I'm going to have a trusted computing panel at CFP in Berkeley on
the morning of April 22. We're going to have people from IBM and
AMD, and I've invited someone from Microsoft. The panel will be
moderated by Danny Weitzner from W3C.
Wendy and I got to take a
tour of
SLAC that was set up by Riana. (I'm really sorry that we messed
things up so that Riana herself didn't get to come.)
I occasionally wonder what the largest room I've ever been in was.
Previously, I thought it was probably either (1) an auditorium or
concert hall of some sort (like the San Francisco Symphony or
the War Memorial Opera House), (2) the Jacob Javits convention
center in New York City, (3) some kind of train station or
airport facility, or (4) the Infinite Corridor at MIT, if you
want to allow corridors. If you want to allow corridors and are
just measuring by volume, I'm sure SLAC set a new record for me
with the linear accelerator shed. But another room we were in (a
decomissioned detector facility) was also quite vast and had an
incredibly deep pit in the floor, so that it seemed to be a pretty
decent contender in the non-corridor rooms category.
"In the television world, 'librarying' is a pejorative term; you can
tell because it includes the much older pejorative term 'library'."
Speaking of libraries, Zack and I went
down to the San Francisco Public
Library on Saturday and got ourselves some library cards. Despite
my vast admiration for librarians, I've used the public library
systems in the places I've lived pretty infrequently, partly because
I really like to own books if I can -- and that means
Bookfinder and bookstores.
(I did confirm the epigraph for my
DeCSS Haiku essay
over at the S.F. Main, and only a while afterward did I remember that I had
originally come across it as part of the epigraph of Commodify Your
Dissent.)
Now the San Francisco Public Library has been criticized by both
Nicholson Baker and Don Marti for getting rid of paper books in favor
of computers and other non-book facilities and resources. If I were
ever criticized by Nicholson Baker and Don Marti over something,
I'd be pretty anxious! And in fact the collection at S.F. Main is looking
pretty small compared to UC Berkeley or compared to the New York Public
Library. (It's probably very respectable in proportion to San Francisco's
population, but not in proportion to its fame.)
I never used the Five College
Consortium interlibrary loan, but I was actually eligble to make
use of it for a while because of my little red Smith College Employee
Dependent ID (one of the four photo ID documents I've ever possessed that
depicts me without a beard). The Five College library system was
particularly impressive because it included the entire collection of UMass
Amherst. Even though I never actually requested anything, I used to have
a great time searching the catalogue. (My Martin Gardner collection is
finally better than the Five College Consortium's, but it wasn't
easy!)
I borrowed Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego because Annalee told me to and I have to do what she
says. Well, at least because I'm writing an article for her and
she recommended Freud on group psychology. (My article is also,
I hope, going to get to make use of my
confabulation experience.)
Zack and I also ate at Tu Lan, making three meals in two weeks
there for me.
I just spent about eight hours installing
Gentoo Linux on a desktop machine
I got from a friend. The installation went smoothly; it took so long
because Gentoo compiles everything from source code. But I
have a headache from watching so many hours of gcc output in reverse
video.
Gentoo doesn't really have much of an installer. It's pretty much a
matter of following some instructions in a text file. It's a great
feeling to know that everything on your system has been locally
compiled, though.
I may have mentioned that the system came to me installed with
Windows XP, and that I used Windows for about a week -- my first
time since 1996, with minor exceptions -- and took some notes on
the experience. I'm going to write something up about that when
I get the chance. It was really amazing. (Should I say
"amusing, awful, and artificial"?)
I found notes on over a year's worth of web diary entries that I never
finished. It's about 100k of notes in about 25 unfinished entries on
what I think is about 100 topics (mostly politics, philosophy, and
things I did this past year). I hope I can find the time to finish and
post all of these!
(Normally what I do when I don't have time to finish an entry is
!}|mail -s 'diary stuff' schoen on it, and it goes right
into my mailbox where it sits around until I notice it again. So I need
to do some serious spring cleaning on all that "diary stuff".)
I had a great weekend speaking at a trusted computing symposium at
Brown University and visiting family and friends in New England. I
ended up visiting over a dozen people in six cities in three states
(which is not so hard considering the size of the states out there).
Among other things, I got a tour of the Mortimer Rare Book Room at
Smith College, where I saw the actual plate "Typus Arithmeticae"
from which the graphic in my bookplate is taken. (It appears in the
first encyclopedia, the Margarita Philosophica, which
the Rare Book Room has. It's kind of a propaganda piece for Arabic
numerals.)
The Rare Book Room also has Robert Recorde's Whetstone of
Witte, the first book to use the equal sign. I
enjoyed the introduction so much that I transcribed some of it
with the idea of posting it here:
Although nomber be infinite in incresyng: so that there is
not in all the worlde any thing that can excede the quantitie
of it: nother the grasse on the ground, nother the
droppes of water in the see, no not the small graines of sande through
the whole masse of the yearth: yet maie it seme by good reason,
that noe man is so experte in Arithmetike, that can
nomber the commodities of it. Wherefore I may truly saie, that if
any imperfection bee in nomber, it is bicause that nomber, can
scarcely nomber, the commodities of it self. [...] And if any
thing doe or maie exceade the whole worlde, it is nomber,
which so farre surmounteth the measure of the world, that if
there were infinite worldes, it would at the full comprehend
them all. This nomber also hath other prerogatives, above
all naturalie thynges, for neither is there certaintie in any
thyng without it, nother good agremente where it wanteth.
I also brought back some Massachusetts maple syrup. Would anyone
like to try some?
Since I flew United, I got to listen to air traffic control on my trip
again. My latest question is why (as far I could tell) a center will
sometimes ask pilots to contact that center on a particular
frequency. It sounded like (say) Minneapolis Center would say "United
567, contact Minneapolis Center on one two three point four five". I
got used to centers handing off flights from one to the next, but I'm
still confused about what seemed to be a "contact me" phenomenon.
I found it very exciting that the American Anthropological Association
chose to make a statement about gay marriage:
Arlington, Virginia; The Executive Board of the American
Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of
anthropologists, the people who study culture, releases the following
statement in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional
amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization.
"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on
households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures
and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that
either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as
an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological
research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types,
including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute
to stable and humane societies.
The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association
strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to
heterosexual couples."
This is to say that people who study the way people actually live
find that there are so many different ways and that these are
astonishingly diverse. And it is hard for that observation to avoid
undermining our confidence in the way we live, even if anthropologists
insist that it wasn't meant to do that. Of course this leads me back to
my strange sympathy for Scalia's position in dissent in
Lawrence v. Texas. I just read in Sigmund Freud's
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego:
This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves
as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular
lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for
their alteration.
Let's say that again in a simpler way. When people are different, we
feel threatened and criticized by their difference. We feel that their
difference is an attack on us and we feel defensive. (One reason for
that could be that if we feel that the way we are is a result of a
moral choice, people who are different are implicitly advocating their
choice as better and criticizing ours. If I say that some activity
is good, not just that I happen to like it, someone who pursues
some other activity is in some way throwing my value judgment into
doubt, or exposing it to scorn. This can be as simple as reading vs.
watching television: the rivalry between the two for people's
attention, and the views of the partisans of or participants in each,
can immediately take on moral dimensions. I have five or ten books
here that take my side of the question and really do take it morally
and personally.)
(There is also the question of progress. If I think of some
technology or practice as progress or an improvement over others,
someone who doesn't use the technology, or who doesn't engage in the
practice, is challenging my claim. The Amish, at an extreme,
challenge our view that we are getting better by inventing new ways
of doing things. The vastly peaceable Amish are vastly threatening.)
I think it's important to recognize that differences can be a kind
of challenge. When we act and believe that our actions have some kind of
meaning or significance, learning about other ways of doing things can
seriously threaten our beliefs. (This is somewhat akin to the way that
The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviours by Kersey Graves
turns out in context to be an attack on Christianity. That book is
open to a great deal of criticism, but it suggests that the gospels'
stories about Jesus are not historically unique.) Do people really feel
-- without effort -- that necessary things are not more valuable than
contingent things, or that unique things are not more valuable than
common?
Our culture, at the very least, contains a reverence for uniqueness
which works against diversity. I'm sure anthropologists and sociologists
have already thought for many years about the comparison to precious
metals which (especially under mercantilist economics, but not
exclusively) have been thought valuable because they are rare. When
we think of things as better and more valuable when they are rare or
unique, we apply a logic exactly opposite to that of the song
about the magic penny. And I think this logic goes deeper than we
can possibly imagine.
Well, there's something to try to track down. Meanwhile, the
anthropologists' observation has force:
"[...] No support whatsoever for the view that
either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as
an exclusively heterosexual institution."
(Thanks to Biella for letting me know about the statement.)
Let me preface my somewhat abstract discussion of this by saying:
about six years ago some people were shot, and some people's homes
were destroyed.
Judge Illston last week denied ChevronTexaco's motion to dismiss
Larry Bowoto v. ChevronTexaco and ruled that the case
can go forward to trial. In her decision, she cited my declaration
in that case!
Bowoto is a case under the Alien Tort Claims Act, from the days when laws were short
and lawsuits brief:
The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil
action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law
of nations or a treaty of the United States.
(That's the entirety of the Act.)
The case deals with military attacks against Nigerian protesters
on the Chevron oil platform at Parabe, Nigeria, and villagers in
Opia and Ikenyan, Nigeria, in 1998 and 1999. You can read
about the case
and the attacks on the EarthRights International home page,
and you can also find
ChevronTexaco's view of the Parabe incident (which
doesn't address Opia or Ikenyan).
EarthRights has also published
Judge Illston's order, which mentions my declaration. I am very honored
to have had a part in this case.
The Supreme Court has just now heard arguments in a separate case called
Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain relating to whether the Alien
Tort Claims Act can be used today to address violations of international
law. It will be really interesting to see what the Court does with
that case.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
