Vitanuova for 2005 May
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A reminder: if you live in the United States and currently get a lot of junk mail, send a postcard with your name, address, and signature to Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 643, Carmel, NY 10512, and you will get vastly less junk mail.

I welcome arguments about any possible reasons not to do this. When I do get junk mail, I try to bounce it back to the sender so that the sender will incur the cost of disposing of it. I do this particularly assiduously if I already have some other reason to dislike the sender. But it would certainly be best not to get the junk mail in the first place. If anyone wants to contribute suggestions on avoiding junk mail, individually or collectively, I'd be happy to discuss them here.

At a tag sale this morning in Davis, I bought a copy of Joe Kaufman's What Makes It Go? What Makes It Work? What Makes It Fly? What Makes It Float?, a children's book about technology that I had read when I was little. Re-reading What Makes It Go? reminded me that I was wrong to think that my interest in technology had been sparked or nourished only by David Macaulay's Underground (which is a fantastic book about what goes on underneath city streets, and the amount of invisible engineering that has to be done to make a city work well). What Makes It Go? was an exciting influence for me, too.

What Makes It Go? is a little reminiscent of Macaulay's The Way Things Work, but at a somewhat lower reading level (and level of technical detail), and with a sense of humor geared more towards children. (Both of them are very funny books.) Apart from being exciting, What Makes It Go? is respectful of its audience, not condescending. It also at least tries to show respect for the history of technologies. There are some important mistakes, especially the picture of a caveman fighting a dinosaur, but the tone and most of the technical detail is really nice.

Since What Makes It Go? was published in 1971, so there's no coverage of cell phones, but there's a lot of material on the moon landing (pp. 32-5). The predictions for the future at the end of the book can be a little hokey, but there's a fairly remarkable discussion of convergence:

Instead of having a separate television, telephone, and record player, as some people do today, you might have one single machine, a home communications center, that would do all the things they do. This machine might also be able to project slides, movies, and video tapes.

When I told Wolfgang about how I admired What Makes It Go?, she suggested that I write a children's book of my own about computer software. That sounds like a great idea. Kragen says he might be interested in working on a project like that with me.

There's a lot to tell about computing. I certainly don't have the whole picture in mind, but I know that when I started to program at age six, I didn't have much conceptual or contextual understanding of computers at all. I knew why I enjoyed programming them, but I didn't know why other people found computers interesting or how they used them or what kinds of ideas were important in the process of teaching computers to do what we wanted them to. Many of the interesting ideas about what computers can and can't do, and how to get them to do it, and what the experience of programming is like, are still often taught only at the university level. (Programmers have often been excited about writing, like Ellen Ullman's, that conveys some idea of what programming is like, because it seems so rare for non-programmers to experience an understanding of what we do, and how we think and feel when we're doing it.)

So I think this might be an interesting thing to work on. Of course, I have to finish my first book about trusted computing first.

At Asilomar recently I encountered the Computist's Quiz, which is pretty nice. (I'm not sure this is the most recent version.) Apparently Donald Knuth enjoyed taking this quiz, which is pretty high praise.

I also recently heard about a self-referential quiz by Don Woods and a slightly better known self-referential quiz by Jim Propp. (Don Woods is the same Don Woods who wrote the Colossal Cave Adventure with Willie Crowther. It turns out that game was based on a real cave!)

If you're a math or programming geek, I think these quizzes might keep you busy for a little while!

This information is pretty well known. For one thing, all native English speakers know it (although some of the details vary from English dialect to English dialect). Amazingly, very few native English speakers are conscious of it or can explain it. It's amazing how language works that way. We can apply rules perfectly without forming any conscious understanding of what we're doing.

In fact, it took me a couple of days of research on my own speech to articulate these rules. (Kragen helped confirm them, and it's clear that people have known and written about them for a long time, so this isn't a new discovery, just a new explanation. This explanation is for Carlos, though I hope it may be useful to other people.)

Written English has certain rules for forming regular past participles and regular plurals. (There are also irregular past participles, such as think/thought and see/seen, and irregular or foreign plurals, such as child/children, cactus/cacti, deer/deer. None of the information here relates to these irregular plurals, only to regular plurals.) The rules in writing are pretty easy. (If you're a native English speaker and want to see what all the fuss is about, skip this part and look down below, where I talked about the complexities of pronunciation.) For past participles, we add "-ed" (sometimes also doubling the consonant) to verbs ending in a consonant; "-d" to verbs ending in "e"; "-ied" to verbs ending in "y" (and delete the "y"); and "-ed" to verbs ending in "a", "i", "o", or "u". There's more that could be said about this, but that's a start. (One question is when we double the consonant; I have a guess but haven't convinced myself that it's a complete account yet.) For plurals, we add "-s" to nouns ending in a vowel or in a consonant other than "s", "ch", "sh", or "z"; "-es" to nouns ending in "s" "ch", or "sh"; and "-ies" to nouns ending in "y" (and delete the "y"), except if the "y" came after a vowel, in which case the "y" is treated as a consonant.

Now, the surprisingly tricky thing is that the rules for pronouncing these participles and plurals have remarkably little to do with how they are written. It quickly becomes apparent that some participles in "-ed" have an extra syllable, and some don't. For example, "darted" is two syllables, but "dashed" is only one syllable (it's pronounced like "dasht"). There are actually three different ways that the "-ed" might be pronounced -- it might be pronounced as "'d", as "'t", or as "-ed". Similarly, there are three different ways that a plural "s" might be pronounced -- as "'s", "'z", or as "ez". It's easy to see this sort of contrast in words like "things" and "thinks" (pronounced like "thingz" and "thinks"), or, for that matter, in "words" and "worts" (pronounced like "wordz" and "worts").

What controls how these are pronounced?

Here's the rule I've developed by studying my own speech. And Kragen seems to agree. If the final sound in a verb in the present tense is:

There's a similar pattern for the plurals.

If the final sound in a noun in the singular is:

The concise rule would then be that the combining forms "-ed" and "-es" are pronounced voiced ("-d", "-z") when combining with an existing vowel, voiced with a separate syllable ("-ed", "-ez") when combining with a similar sound that would create ambiguities ("s+s"="sez", "z+s"="zez", "d+ed"="ded", "t+ed"="ted", etc.), and otherwise voiced ("-d", "-z") after a voiced consonant and unvoiced ("-t", "-s") after an unvoiced consonant.

Native English speakers -- depending on their dialect -- know these rules strongly enough that they can apply them to nonexistent and made-up words, and even apply them (especially as children) faithfully to form and plausibly pronounce nonexistent forms of words that actually have irregular plurals or participles. But we still can't describe how we know how to pronounce our own language without doing a lot of research and reflection to try to extract a rule.

There's nothing like trying to explain something to make it seem unfamiliar and challenging when it was previously second nature.

If you know any exceptions, I'd be interested in hearing them. I might make a follow-up post on this topic, because I found it very interesting to study; I managed to produce my own corpus and then examine it for patterns, just like a real linguist, even though the speech I was studying was my own. But here's a warning: I don't plan to update or correct this post, so I don't recommend relying on it if you're a non-native student of English, especially if you have a more formal reference or a native speaker available. This explanation is just based on my own experiments with my own dialect, and, while there is an English phonetic rule along these lines, I may well have oversimplified it in a way that could be misleading.

Chris, who is a real linguist, reminded me of the concise notation that linguists have for expressing rules like those I recently wrote about. The rules for both past participle and plural are the same at this level of abstraction, and can be written in just two lines of symbols, although I don't know how to write them in HTML. Chris describes the first rule in words as "epenthesis [insertion of vowel] for CC [consonant followed by consonant] at same place and manner of articulation" and the second rule as "assimilation of word-final voicing".

It's nice that linguists have gotten so good at this stuff that they can communicate so concisely about it.

Did I say anything on this blog about that occasion on which I won a burrito from a jurisconsult (sc. Robin Dora Gross) by following a strict constraint in choosing my words throughout a long party?

It looks like they must be pretty serious.

I got a Powerball gyroscope toy, and I look forward to getting used to it; I'll let you know what I think when I've tried it for awhile. My hope in getting it is to strengthen my arms and reduce RSI problems; of course, several people who saw it immediately asked whether it were intended to cause or to cure RSI.

Google thinks it's much more common for people to have asked whether it was than to have asked whether it were, as I just reported some of my friends did with respect to my Powerball on seeing it for the first time. A reader is having trouble with that subjunctive, though.

The reason I used the subjunctive there is not specifically that I thought it was appropriate, but that I was influenced by the cena Latina I attended yesterday. I formed a whole bunch of indirect questions during the cena with subjunctives, like "scire velim an rusticatio iam sit plena", "debeo rogare an possint pittam, aut partem pittae, facere sine caseo", etc. (In case you were wondering, the answers to these two questions turned out to be "no" and "yes", which were just the answers I had been hoping for.) There is some discussion in the Vulgar Latin book I've been looking at about the emergence of "si" to mean "whether" as well as the conditional "if" (compare Portuguese "se"), but I've been sticking with "an".

Anyway, I'm not sure whether English indirect questions should use the subjunctive or not. I just used the subjunctive there because I was still thinking in a Latinate kind of way when I wrote my post about the Powerball. I welcome other opinions.

I bet some of you have a lot of Aaron's data cached, either in browser caches or RSS caches or whatever. If you do have some of it, can you help him get it back?

Eric Rescorla and his commenters are having a great discussion of Divine Command Theory and the Euthyphro problem. Eric is saying more rigorously something that I've tried to articulate in the past -- basically, that belief in a law-giving God is neither necessary nor (without more) sufficient for morality.

I actually visited Eric's site because I was looking for one of his papers on economics and computer security, but I'll take a good discussion of the Euthyphro instead...

Kragen has been pretty excited about something called dominant assurance contracts. These are a structure for funding the creation of public goods (solving the "public goods problem"), which continues to be a thorny and important problem. I haven't been able to understand the math so far; there's apparently an argument indicating that dominant assurance contracts should be able to fund projects that other funding models can't, without necessarily relying on altruism.

In discussing this prospect, Kragen made the simple but important observation that pretty much everyone experiences both self-interested and altruistic motivations. That suggests that economists who ignore or disbelieve in altruism have an overly narrow view, whereas idealists who try to solve large problems by relying only on altruism may not succeed.

Kragen was so interested in this paper that he made dozens of hard copies and spread them around at several places where lots of people were gathered. The number of people I met or heard about over and over again this weekend reminds me what a small world it is. Maybe its smallness will help Kragen spread this idea around quickly, if it turns out to work well.

I'm troubled to hear that the flag-burning amendment continues to be reintroduced every year. Apparently ACLU believes that there is once again a real risk that the amendment could pass. (It's worth noting that the amendment has already long commanded a majority in Congress, just not the required two-thirds supermajority necessary for a constitutional amendment.)

I'm comparably troubled because just the other day I suddenly remembered that I supported banning flag-burning when I was 12. I've been trying to remember what I was thinking; one obvious fact is that I did not have a radical civil liberties or human rights orientation until I was a teenager. In fact, I had a very Manichaean radical social conservative view. Good guys, bad guys; good acts, bad acts; unquestionable and unexamined rules that classify everything. I wonder how I exchanged that notion for civil liberties activism. Buried in that question is another question of whether other people can be induced to do the same thing and to follow the same path.

The other interesting questions about the views I had that led me to support censorship are, first, which vestiges of those views do I still hold, and, second, was there any validity to those views?

Star Wars Episode III was cheesy; it made a deliberate political reference to a timely and also a perennial problem, which is that you start out trying to do something and then you do the very opposite of that thing through your fervor to do it. Among the Star Wars instances of this in Episode III are Palpatine's attempt to save the Republic and Anakin Skywalker's attempt to save Padmé. The ease with which this can happen at any scale may be one reason why Eric Hoffer wrote things like

It is not only more sensible but more humane to base social practice on the assumption that all motives are questionable and that in the long run social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives. The establishment of a desirable pattern of habits is more vital than the implanting of right beliefs and motives. A concern with right and wrong thinking is the manifestation of a primitive, superstitious mentality.

I believe that I've already experienced in my own life the kind of thing that George Lucas describes as happening to Anakin Skywalker (although I was fortunate enough not to have destroyed any planets as a result). And many other people have described it as well, and it's scary, because it means that we have to do something other than just have good motives or good fantasies, but we don't necessarily know what.

In the meantime, I hope some of you will help ACLU try to beat the flag-burning amendment again.

Zooko just sent me an interesting note about the ways of thinking about "incentive". In Zooko's view, "incentive" is often used to mean "motivation" but should instead more often be used to mean "way of meeting opportunity costs". For example, someone might say that royalties provide "incentive" for writing books or computer software. If "incentive" meant "motivation", this would be expressly contrary to lots of people's personal experience, since many people have found themselves quite motivated to do this sort of creative work. But if incentive refers to how people afford to do things instead of why they want to do them, it would be much more plausible -- in the sense that lots of people have to work for a living and meet other obligations, so that they don't have a lot of time to do creative work outside of their jobs. Zooko says he's becoming more and more aware of this sense of "incentive" because he has more obligations than he used to, so while his motivations to do things are undiminished, his available time and resources are more constrained.

This account is consistent (as I think Zooko observed) with Alfie Kohn's work on rewards. Getting paid for something may, at least according to some empirical research, actually make you want to do it less, and make you care about it less. But given other commitments and opportunity costs, it might also provide you with the opportunity to do it in the first place.

I think the word "incentive" has become rather politically charged. It's become common for people in copyright industries, especially in political advocacy, to use "incentive" as if it meant "motivation" -- but we know perfectly well that the copyright system and the copyright industries are rarely (charitably, "not uniformly") the reason people engage in expression and creativity. We might fall back on a statement like Lewis Thomas's, that "it is human nature to want to exchange ideas"; we might report on our personal experience, that we want to tell other people about what we think and feel and imagine and learn how to accomplish. In that context, it just sounds silly to speak of financial compensation as the only motivation for creativity, or to suggest that nobody would communicate without being paid to communicate. (Recall that they say Samuel Johnson said "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." You still hear that today.)

Ignoring for the moment the deep cultural chasms that can develop between people who practice the same thing as a vocation and as an avocation, it's true that the things we want to do have opportunity costs. And so in a world where there are debts to pay and obligations to meet, compensation can be a way of overcoming those opportunity costs, to give people the opportunity to do the things that perhaps they really wanted to do all along. In Zooko's account, that's incentive. "[I]t isn't that the [compensation] makes people feel happier about" their creative work. Of course, Zooko said this better and more concisely, and with reference to his actual experience.

In a way, this idea is sort of commonplace. I know plenty of people who have lots of good projects that they really want to work on, that they would really enjoy doing, that they want to share with other people, and they just wish that someone would come along and pay them to do those projects in lieu of spending their time on other things that are less interesting. Not that their existing projects are in any way deficient, but Matt Ettus and Bunnie Huang are two such people just within the electrical engineering world. They could each keep busy for years with useful, interesting stuff that they would like to do, if you want to pay them to do it. And that's a perfectly familiar sort of "incentive", as opposed to the kind of bribery to do something you hate -- which is what I often enough think I hear in copyright industries' policy advocacy rhetoric.

I'm not sure what motivated Zooko to make this observation just now, but I think it was my discussion of dominant assurance contracts. Maybe someone should try setting up such contracts to support Bunnie or Matt in working on something that is a public good in the field of technology. Or to support Zooko!

I had a lot of fun at CopyNight yesterday, including meeting Joe Gratz and several other people, and a lot of discussion about the other AAUP letter to Google, the Audio Home Recording Act, the prehistory of some of our contemporary copyright law (in the 1980s and 1990s!), and so on.

I just wrote a paper about compatibility in which I suggest that we should have privacy in what technology we use (that is, an attempt to tell or a means of telling technologies apart can be seen as a privacy invasion). I'm therefore relieved that at least one person on the other side is straightforward in saying that compatibility is not a goal for him.

We had this fight a lot (mostly out of sight of the press) when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested. Dmitry's software achieved compatibility between Adobe eBooks and every sort of digital device in the world. Adobe's reaction was to say explicitly that this was improper because they were entitled to decide which kinds of compatibility could exist. Even though it was technically possible to achieve universal compatibility (and Dmitry had done so), they would, so to speak, try to turn back the clock and say that consumers were only entitled to compatibility on Adobe's schedule and at Adobe's sufferance. They said that even though you knew how to get the compatibility you wanted, you would have to wait until they did it for you, and they couldn't say when that would be.

More recently, when Real figured out how to achieve compatibility with Apple, Apple went on the attack and said that Real was using "the tactics and ethics of a hacker". Jamie Boyle explained the issue well:

The first lesson of the story is how strangely people use the metaphors of tangible property in new economy disputes. How exactly had Real "broken into" the iPod? It hadn't broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real's service to download music to my own device, where's the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod "interoperable" with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I "breaking into Word"? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)

Their true sin was trying to understand the iPod so that they could make it do things that Apple did not want it to do. As an ethical matter, is figuring out how things work, in order to compete with the original manufacturers, breaking and entering? In the strange netherland between hardware and software, device and product, the answer is often a morally heartfelt "yes!" I would stress "morally heartfelt". It is true manufacturers want to make lots of money, and would rather not have competitors. Bob Young of Red Hat claims "every business person wakes up in the morning and says 'how can I become a monopolist?'" Beyond that, though, innovators actually come to believe that they have the moral right to control the uses of their goods after they are sold. This isn't your iPod, it's Apple's iPod. Yet even if they believe this, we don't have to agree.

One approach to this is to deny that Real did to say that Real did adopt the tactics and ethics of a hacker, and that those ethics are actually preferable to Apple's ethics. Because Apple's ethics say that compatibility is not a goal, and the ethics of the hacker say that compatibility is a goal, and more than a goal.

And those ethics are outraged when someone precludes what we want and know how to do, and says: Be ye therefore patient.

Congratulations to Biella on her defense of her dissertation at the University of Chicago!

I hear that legal maxims don't have to agree, but I'm just curious. What about "damnum absque iniuria" vs. "every wrong has a remedy"?

I got a Powerball gyroscope toy and have been exercising with it, typically getting around 8,000 RPM but once momentarily breaking 10,000 RPM. I may yet write a piece about geeky forms of exercise.

The disturbing thing about the Powerball is of course that everyone who has seen it, starting with Aaron, has immediately asked "Is that meant to cause RSI, or cure it?".

Vitanuova for 2005 May
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Contact: Seth David Schoen