I was telling Michelle about how "Gesundheit" is formed from "gesund" and the suffix "-heit".
"It's a noun-forming suffix -- it means '-ness'. Like Sicherheit from sicher and Freiheit from frei."
Unfortunately for me, neither of my other examples ends in "-ness" in English; they mean security and freedom, respectively. So much for "-ness"!
Then there's "-keit", which I think is just a phonological process acting on "-heit" (for example "aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit"; also the observation of Wittgenstein that I will someday use in the dedication of my book: "Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt"). But Michelle suggested that it means "kiteness; the quality of being a kite".
I went to the hearing in our case against AT&T this morning. You can see Quinn's pictures on Flickr; my tie is visible in one of them, but that's about it for me.
The courtroom artist in Quinn's first picture, in case you're curious, identified herself as Vicki Ellen Behringer. You may have seen her work in the media before.
Apparently Riana is hoping to watch the demolition of the cooling tower of a decommissioned nuclear power plant in Washington state Oregon tomorrow morning.
When I read that traffic will be prohibited on the nearby freeway during the demolition, my first thought was: "What, are they afraid that terrorists will try to stop them from blowing up the nuclear power plant?"
My first time making the front page of a newspaper: my testimony at the Local Agency Formation Commission on Friday was the subject of a story featured on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner (where it bore the headline "S.F. Wi-Fi could violate users' privacy, foes say").
The article mentions that I discussed how laptops can be tracked using their MAC addresses; therefore, a citywide wi-fi network would allow its operator to track individuals' physical movements around the city. (This is a larger concern than a patchwork of independently-operated wi-fi networks, whose operators don't co-operate to share data with one another.) However, the most recent version of the Google-Earthlink city-wide wi-fi proposal seems to require users to log in, which has the same problem even if the network didn't keep track of MAC addresses (and conversely, MAC addresses allow tracking of individual users even if they don't have to log in -- which is why in either case, privacy would be protected better if the network had limitations on the retention of data about its users).
ACLU, EPIC, and EFF's letter to the city in April has more detail about these concerns.
Mako mentions that the Free Software Foundation will hold a "defective by design" protest at WinHEC tomorrow (May 23). That's a nice slogan, and I hope that this effort attracts some interest beyond the free software movement.
I arrived in Brazil yesterday and felt very happy that, of the twelve or so people I asked for various kinds of help in Guarulhos airport, only one refused to speak Portuguese with me and broke into English. Progress.
I saw a pun that would work in English too, so I thought I should let the Anglophone world know about it. Rio de Janeiro has a place called UniverCidade. That is to say "UniverCity".
