Vitanuova for 2005 October
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O vos omnes, o vos omnes
qui transitis per viam
attendite, attendite
et videte:
si est dolor sicut dolor meus.

(after Lamentations 1:12 (Vulgate))

Here are three sets of photographs from the EFF 15th birthday party this weekend:

I show up only in Jacob's set.

This very blue picture shows a new printer test sheet I made with a picture of Shi Tao and the text (from the Wikipedia article on Samizdat):

Before Glasnost, the practice [of Samizdat publishing] was dangerous, since copy machines, printing presses and even typewriters in offices were under control of the First Departments (KGB outposts): for all of them reference printouts were stored for identification purposes.

The blue light reveals (to anyone looking at the page in person, though not in Jacob's photograph) a matrix of yellow dots which Xerox caused its DocuColor printers to include to help law enforcement identify the origins of printed documents. See our page on this, which I need to update with lots of new information.

"I suspect Microsoft Windows Product Activation fails the Desert Island Test. In fact, Windows probably fails every test. I doubt Windows can be packaged in Debian."

Here an anthropologist in Nevada discovers that state's loyalty oath and suggests that it may have been revived there because of recent concerns about terrorism. I did have a feeling that it would be harder to abolish the California loyalty oath after the September 11 attack than before it. This makes me wonder why so many people adopted the conventional wisdom, not that civil liberties should be compromised or less vigorously advanced, but that naturally Americans in general could be expected to believe this about civil liberties. I and virtually every civil libertarian I know adopted an anxious attitude about the "post-September 11 climate" even where we had never personally experienced another American exhibiting concrete disdain for, or skepticism about, civil liberties as a result of the attack. How did that happen?

How much of the concrete erosion of civil liberties that subsequently developed was a result of some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy about what other Americans would believe? And, to the extent that it was, where did that prophecy come from?

Even to me, concrete action and activism against the state loyalty oaths felt more natural or obvious during the boom, when it felt like a time self-assured enough to be generous and to try to do the right thing just for fun. As opposed, for instance, to what Dar Williams says about when she was growing up, just after the time that the loyalty oaths came to prominence in the universities:

I'm no ordinary princess, I was born in the Cold War,
And my team is the Rockets.
Go team, it's a dangerous time.

I agree with the anthropologist (Dustin Wax) that

Although I imagine that administering loyalty oaths makes those who administer it feel like they are taking some sort of action against a vague and unsettling threat, I think it is more fruitful to consider the oath as a display of power. The State is not telling me to be loyal -- if they were, they would spell out what explicitly they consider disloyal -- they are rather asserting their ability to force me to declare my loyalty.

That is what the loyalty oath has in common with "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance: it is showing off, conspicuously displaying a power to define, a power to get people to say things. That power thrives on "a dangerous time".

This afternoon I'm going to see Good Night, and Good Luck -- a movie about that original "dangerous time". Maybe it will help me understand what makes us assume that other people will see a time as dangerous or safe, or assume that they will cherish or ignore civil liberties.

Instead of Good Night, and Good Luck, Nick and I saw Proof. I never saw the play, but I thought the movie was well done. (I should warn prospective viewers that there is not actually very much mathematics in the movie, even though it's about mathematicians. Interestingly, it should be possible to figure out when the events of the movie are supposed to take place based on the value of the largest known Sophie Germain prime at the time.)

There is something about the dialogue in the movie that makes it feel like a play; I think it's the sequentiality of the characters' lines, the fact that they almost never talk over one another or interrupt one another.

The question of gender roles in mathematics looms large in the movie, although there are really only a tiny number of scenes that make it explicit. Those scenes make it really explicit, in one case painfully so, and I first thought that one of them was overdone, and then, when I thought more about it, I concluded that it was realistic and plausible in context. (It could have been a little more realistic if the director had been a little less afraid of including some real mathematics in the movie. If there's a question about how much mathematics different people appear to know, it's hard to dramatize this when they can only speak about mathematics in a way that's supposed to be totally clear to a non-mathematical audience.)

Robert Ebert gives the movie an enthusiastic review, with a focus on the authenticity of everyone's language:

There is a memorial service at which the speaker (Gary Houston) sounds precisely as such speakers sound; his subject is simultaneously the dead mathematician, and his sense of his own importance. There is a faculty party at which all of the right notes are sounded. And when Catherine and Hal speak, they talk as friends, lovers and fellow mathematicians; they communicate in several languages while speaking only one.

I wholeheartedly agree -- except that Catherine and Hal spend so little time talking as "fellow mathematicians" outside of that one painful scene meant to establish that Hal is infected with (and perhaps struggling against) his discipline's sexism. Nobody ever seems to mention the substance of mathematics except to help in fairly concrete and immediate ways with plot and character development. So I wouldn't grant Hal and Catherine quite as many "languages" as Ebert does.

Now that I've made that criticism more or less three times, let me conclude by recommending the movie. The relationships make sense, the accusations make sense, the developments make sense, the whole thing makes sense and hangs together.

This will have been one of the most complicated weeks I've experienced in recent memory. By the middle of next week, I'll post about some of the more pleasant things that have been going on. Keep an eye out!

Among many, many other things:

I had often wondered how we got from one Latin verb "to be" to two verbs with that meaning in Spanish and Portuguese. I assumed that one or the other must have come from a different Latin verb, and now Wikipedia's excellent article on the Romance copula explains that the verbs in question are esse and stare -- that is, estar originally meant "to stand", where ser meant "to be". Nowadays in modern Portuguese you have to specify "estar em pé", for apparently standing became metaphorical or even metonymic for temporary or accidental existence. (Cf. "The Union stands as she stood".)

P.S. I went to school "in the border country, where Massachusetts joins Vermont and New Hampshire"; they didn't teach me about Daniel Webster, or ser and estar, but they did teach me a whole lot else.

I'm going to be on TV on KPIX (and possibly other CBS stations) at 6:20 p.m. today (Tuesday), and probably on KCBS radio tomorrow morning, as well as in the Washington Post tomorrow and the Boston Globe and Red Herring pretty soon. There is also the AP story and a lot else that I don't have time to track down. But it looks like people are surprised and interested.

I just got back from a great trip to New York City. I want to congratulate the Software Freedom Law Center on getting underway there, Karen Kukil on the No Other Appetite exhibit, Wendy on her law professorship, and thank all the friends and family I saw there for a fun time.

Wendy took a nice picture of me at the Hunter College School of Social Work, where my father went to graduate school:

Don Marti has pointed to Liu Xiaobo's letter to Jerry Yang about Shi Tao; I have rarely seen a more eloquent or a more righteously indignant letter (even in translation).

I saw in your resume that you are the same age as Shi Tao, thirty-seven. But there are no other similarities between you.

Born in Taipei in 1968, you moved to the United States at the age of 10 and then entered Stanford University to study electrical engineering. Your business intuition and talents are admirable. While preparing your doctoral thesis, you designed software for Internet searching, and then, in 1995, you co-created the Yahoo! Internet navigational guide with David Filo and co-founded Yahoo! Inc. Your company brings convenience to billions of netizens around the world, including about 100 million Chinese netizens.

Shi Tao, aged 37, is a native of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. He was a famous campus poet and took an active part in the pro-democracy movement in 1989 when he was a student at East China Normal University. The Tiananmen Massacre changed many people, including Shi Tao, and rendered him into a journalist who writes under the guidance of his conscience, a poet who pays attention to the tortured and oppressed and a fighter against the dictatorship.

You are luckier than Shi Tao. You were born into an authoritarian society in Taiwan, but you left for a country of freedom, where you received a first-class education and became the tycoon of the cyber economy. You can live with dignity without worrying about the terror of politics; you can cultivate your talents without being controlled by officials, and you can obtain information and learn facts without worrying about your personal safety.

But Shi Tao has been tortured by the memory of blood. He must face the terror of politics, must fight against the abuse of personal freedom and dignity and must hold to his conscience as a man. In China, where everything is settled behind closed doors, Mr. Shi has no way of identifying what is a "state secret" and what is not, and moreover, he lacked knowledge about your company's latent business principles.

Thanks to Leonard for finding this great self-referential sentence:

"They say an axe murderer lived in this sentence once," says Giblets. "But he killed all references to himself."

Vitanuova for 2005 October
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Contact: Seth David Schoen