I recently mentioned the fact that some (actually, almost all) functions (and real numbers) are not computable by a Turing machine. I gave some very familiar examples: the Busy Beaver function, the Entscheidungsproblem or halting problem, and Chaitin's omega.
One thing that bothers me is that all of these examples construct an uncomputable function or constant by reference to the properties of activities of Turing machines themselves: that is, they are all functions describing the (hypothetical) behavior of other computers or programs. All of these uncomputable things relate to attempts to summarize or predict the behavior of other computations or sets of computations.
There is a sense in which this feels like a gimmick, like these problems were devised or mentioned only in order to set up the diagonalization arguments, like these problems would be relatively unlikely to arise "naturally" in an area of mathematics or thought other than the problem of computability itself. Does anyone know an example of a function or number that is known to be formally uncomputable by a Turing machine but whose definition or at least motivation doesn't involve computation or computability?
"We're still evaluating and determining what the most appropriate course of action is," said Michael Ayers.
How about selling movies in cleartext?
On Saturday, I took the new Third Street Light Rail from the 4th and King Caltrain station to Bayshore. It was basically like riding any other Muni Metro line, but I was amazed at how much of San Francisco I've never seen. The southeastern part of the city is mysteriously invisible to those who don't live there; much of it is impoverished, it has much less economic activity than elsewhere in the city, portions have been polluted by a power plant and an abandoned naval station, there are few or no tourist attractions, and the region doesn't even appear on some tourist maps. For me, the City usually seems to be bordered by the freeways: I pretty much never venture southeast of the 280, or into the triangle bounded by the 280, the 101, and Cesar Chavez.
The Third Street rail line is still gleaming and new and takes thirty to forty minutes between Caltrain and Bayshore. It runs right past the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, which is going to have a major effect on southeastern San Francisco. If you like mass transit tourism, you have until April to take a preview ride on the weekend; board the T Third at any K, L, or M stop between Castro and Embarcadero, or at any former N stop between Embarcadero and 4th and King, or at any new T stop south of 4th and King. In the latter case, your ride is free until regularly scheduled service begins.
The notion of a cryptographic key was created by analogy to physical locks and keys, but it looks like the cryptographers may have had the deeper insight: the authorizing function of any "key" (a PGP key, a door key, a voting machine key) is really a relatively tiny amount of information (usually digital information, even in the case of pin-and-tumbler locks, since there are typically explicit digital descriptions of any key: note that "[a]ll lock makers assign [integer] values to each pin depth so that keys can be replicated by number rather than requiring the physical key", per Marc Tobias's explanation of bump keys, which includes a nice diagram of the fact that door keys are really physical analog approximations of what their manufacturers conceive of as small digital secrets).
The neat new example of this: a photograph of a pin-and-tumbler lock key is equivalent to the key itself. Not only can you make photographs from keys, you can make keys from photographs.
My roommate pointed out that the ubiquitous farewell "ciao" (known to Brazilians, for instance, as "tchau") actually means "slave".
Wikipedia agrees that the word comes from an abbreviation of a phrase akin to Italian "sono vostro schiavo" ("I am your slave"). This sounds less bizarre in the context of ancient letter closings like "I beg to remain / your most humble and obedient servant", but it's still pretty weird to modern ears.
"Schiavo" is still the modern Italian term for "slave" (that's what Terri Schiavo's last name means, as far as I can tell); compare Portuguese "escravo" and Spanish "esclavo". (I think that the name of the city and river Escravos in Nigeria is a reference to the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade. Nigeria lay along what was formerly known as the "Slave Coast", akin to the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast. The Slave Coast is no longer so called, yet Nigeria still has a city whose name means Slaves.)
The other bizarre thing is that, if we believe Wikipedia, all of these words -- "Escravos" as well as "ciao" as well as the English word "slave" -- actually derive from the name of the Slavs because of their propensity to be enslaved as prisoners of war in classical antiquity.
When I was in Germany I admired some posters that read "Die moderne Frau / kocht ohne Sau" so much that I bought one from the vegan store in Berlin where I went shopping. The poster wouldn't fit into my luggage, so I carefully carried it by hand on various trains, busses, and planes, and through several airports, and then promptly lost it on the Boston subway.
Fortunately, I was able to order some replacements from emu Verlag, and they arrived today.
This gives rise to three obvious questions:
- Are these posters sexist?
- How would you translate the sense of the slogan into other languages so that it still rhymes? (I remember when a classicist at Berkeley, probably Jed Parsons, had assembled a remarkable set of translations of the traditional anti-poison ivy mnemonic rhyme "Leaves of three / let them be" into a huge number of other languages -- for example "Herba trifola / fac ut sit sola". Who can do the same for this jingle?)
- I have one spare copy. Who would like it? (It seems natural somehow to give women higher priority than men...)
In my opinion, the franchise that's really crying out to be made into a movie is Raymond Smullyan's work. Especially the various islands and countries with vampires, sorcerers, knights, knaves, and so on. They would be a picturesque backdrop for a movie and I don't think it could help but be the ultimate geek thriller.
I was just cataloguing a 1949 edition of the Summa Theologica and noticing the imprimatur page. At the bottom of the page, I came across the following text:
Ius proprietatis vindicabitur (24-x-49)
I think that's the first copyright notice I've ever seen in Latin. Most Latin-language books I have either have no copyright notice or else a copyright notice in English. The stated copyright date is October 24, 1949 (following Italian, not ancient Roman, usage).
I wish I could remember where I recently heard about CryoPID. This is super-awesome.
CryoPID consists of a program called freeze that captures the state of a running process and writes it into a file. The file is self-executing and self-extracting, so to resume a process, you simply run that file.
It works astonishingly well. (I bet it will be tempting for people who like to cheat at video games...)
How can a CD-ROM drive in a PC accurately read (or write) particular bits on the surface of a CD, even while the computer is in use, being typed on, possibly being moved around, etc.? Isn't the structure used to represent an individual bit remarkably tiny in comparison to the vibrations produced by typing (let along picking up an operating laptop), or the macroscopic imperfections produced by wear and stress on the CD drive tray? How can the CD-ROM aim and focus accurately at the level of an individual bit given all the mechanical noise enveloping the system?
One of the talks at the Emerging Technology Conference here in San Diego that I'm going to miss because I'm coming home tomorrow is called "Deus Ex Automata". I found this title jarring because it reflects a misinterpretation of what's going on in the phrase "deus ex machina" (or, if you prefer, an overgeneralization of the apparent pattern in that phrase). The presenter seems to have thought that you can form a Latin phrase of the form "deus ex _____a" with any noun if you just know a Latin noun that ends in "a" (or, to overgeneralize even more incorrectly, perhaps the presenter thought that you could plug any noun in the blank spot after "deus ex _____").
This is not true. The preposition "ex" governs the ablative case, which is a fancy way of saying that noun forms change after the word "ex" to show that they are the particular things out of which something is coming, and so on. For example, the Nicene Creed (in the Western churches' versions) claims that the Holy Spirit "ex patre filioque procedit" (proceeds from the father and from the son), language which has been a point of theological controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity for hundreds of years. But the basic (nominative) forms of those nouns are "pater" and "filius"; they got modified into "patre" and "filio" because they came after "ex".
In a similar vein, if we wanted to translate Mao's claim about the origins of political power into Latin, we might say something like "tota potestas rei publicae ex armis oritur" (I'm not going to try to figure out a more precise way to refer to the "barrel of a gun" at the moment without access to some more skillful neolatinists or their dictionaries). But of course the basic form of the word for weapons is "arma". Now the fact that the first word of Vergil's Aeneid is also "arma" shows a coincidence, because Vergil's "arma" is in the accusative case because it is the direct object of "cano" (I sing [about]). It just so happens that "arma" is a word that doesn't visibly change when you change it from the nominative to the accusative. That's not true of the second word of the Aeneid, "virumque" (whose basic form is "vir" and which did indeed get changed as a result of being the object of "cano").
Similarly, "machina" is a noun which doesn't visibly change when you put it in the ablative case after "ex", unlike, say, "pater", "filius", or "arma". At least, it doesn't change if you're using a writing system that doesn't mark vowel quantity, since strictly speaking the final "a" was originally short and becomes long in the ablative, sometimes written as "māchinā" (thus "deus ex māchinā").
"Automata" can't possibly be in this category, because it's not in the first declension (where all nouns that don't change from the nominative to the ablative are) because it's plural, and the first declension doesn't have any plurals that end in "-a".
If we believe
Lewis and Short and
Wikipedia, "automaton" in Latin is a Greek loanword that must fall into the second declension neuter paradigm, which means that its nominative plural is "automata" but its ablative plural is "automatis". Then the only correct way to say "god from automata" in Latin is "deus ex automatis" (or "deus ex automatīs" if you mark vowel quantity).
Since the Emerging Tech page about that talk doesn't provide any contact information for the speaker and since I'm on my way home, I have no idea to whom to complain about this problem. A few years ago I had a similar quarrel with "magnum opii" as a purported plural of "magnum opus" in a Microsoft ad; this shows three different kinds of confusion about Latin plurals. The correct plural is
"magna
opera".
I'm sorry to see that many other people writing on the web have used "magnum opii" or the more plausible but still wrong "magnum opi". But Microsoft should have been able to pay someone enough to achieve a correct plural!
If you happen to want to see the original Greek word in use in a Greek text, Eva Brann has pointed out that Hephaistos in Iliad 18 is busy making αυτοματοι, which she translates as "robots" (!). From the context, it appears that that's exactly what he's making.
Sumana has gotten at least mock-anxious about what I think of her blog's name. Actually, I think Cogito, ergo Sumana is pretty funny (although I do notice the lexical category mismatch every time I see it!). What gets my proverbial goat is when people try to make a joke on a Latin phrase where there is an actual, specific way to say in Latin what they want to say and they don't make use of that actual way.
My mother, whose mother hated and wanted to blot out the memory of the Old Country as though it were the name of Amalek, grew up learning so little of her family's history that she believed that Yiddish was a kind of jargon or slang that people used in English, a few funny words and phrases like "schlemiel", "shmata", "schlep", "gut yontiff", and "oy gevalt" that you could throw into your English as a kind of coloring. When she heard that some people she knew were planning to teach their children to speak Yiddish, she was genuinely puzzled: why (and how) would you teach people to "speak" a kind of slang?
What my mother didn't know, because her mother didn't think it was important for her to know it, is that Yiddish isn't just a kind of English slang that some people from the Old Country used to use in a certain tone of voice to convey certain emotions, but rather a full-fledged language once spoken as a first language by millions of people, with its own grammar, written literature, and dictionaries, in which you could say anything you wanted. Since Yiddish is a real language and not just a collection of phrases you can appropriate to make your English look down-home or traditional, it's actually possible to teach your kids to speak it fluently, and it's actually possible for things to be grammatical or ungrammatical, plausible or implausible, plausible-sounding or grating, in Yiddish.
The same, mutatis mutandis, is true of Latin; as Reginald Foster says, "in Roma antiqua etiam canes Latine locuti sunt"; in ancient Rome even the dogs spoke Latin. (Presumably they spoke good Latin, or at least as good as modern dogs' English, as opposed to "dog Latin", which is the name for the practice that I'm complaining about here!) In exactly the same way as Yiddish, Latin is a full-fledged language with its own rules, norms, and principles, not just a closed set of funny phrases, proverbs, and maxims (like "mutatis mutandis") that lend dignity or prestige to English sentences. Now, the existence of Latin grammar is a more famous fact in the world today than the existence of Yiddish grammar, since Latin is one of the most prestigious languages ever and is the origin of our models for traditional grammar as well as of many of our traditional grammatical concepts and categories. And Latin grammar is famous for being complicated (although it might be better to say that it just has a whole lot of morphology to memorize). Yiddish, on the other hand, has never been a famous or prestigious language, and not everyone who spoke it was proud of speaking it. The architects of modern Hebrew like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did not have a particularly high opinion of Yiddish and did not think it would be a good thing for Jews to continue to speak in the future. On the other side, I remember a citation to an article by Uzzi Ornan arguing that "Hebrew is Not a Jewish Language"!
(I pause to try to imagine someone in Spain who wanted to recreate the Roman Empire and wanted to substitute modern Latin for all the Romance languages. It's true that Latin has been suggested repeatedly as a common language for the European Union, but never, as far as I know, with the same kind of antipathy toward modern Romance that Ben-Yehuda had toward Yiddish...)
The most basic consequence of the fact that Latin, like Yiddish, is a language and not a set of slang or stock phrases is that both languages have a grammar that make things you say in them Latin sound right or wrong. If you simply take words from the dictionary and plug them into existing phrases you're likely to get it wrong, especially in a highly inflected language like Finnish or ancient Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. That is the "dog Latin" phenomenon. Of course, you can run into trouble even without inflection -- for example, English uses infinitives with modal verbs ever so slightly differently from other languages. I once heard a native Spanish speaker say *"I can't to go", obviously by analogy to "yo no puedo ir"; similarly in Latin you could say "nescio natare", or in Portuguese "não sei nadar", but the English version has to be "I don't know how to swim". You could say "possum scribere" or "posso escrever", but in English you have to say "I can write". The alternatives -- "I don't know to swim" or "I can to write" are grating to an English speaker, just as *"deus ex automata" is grating to a Latin speaker. But "I can to write" could be derived by the exact same means that would yield "deus ex automata": just look up "possum" (I can) and "scribere" (to write) in the dictionary and plug them in...
On the other hand, "cogito ergo Sumana" is a pun. It's too bad that it crosses lexical categories, replacing a verb with a noun; it would be a better pun if it didn't. But I think of it first and foremost as a pun.
My introduction of Bruce Schneier together with his acceptance speech from the EFF Pioneer Awards ceremony on Tuesday in San Diego is available on-line.
I made use of the Bruce Schneier Facts to present some little-known facts about Schneier. In his acceptance speech, Schneier discussed the "data shadow" that our on-line activities leave behind us in the form of transactional log data, and developed the metaphor of the data shadow as a form of pollution.
I just wrote a sentence that contained the phrase "talking trash about the Treaty of Tordesilhas".
Cool, I made the spring issue of Tube Times (see article "Viva las Lane Stewards", p. 5). I think the hazard in question was actually on Market or Sanchez. And while the article title is probably a nod to Viva Las Vegas, this Lane Steward assures readers that he is grammatically masculine.
I've been enjoying my work as a Lane Steward quite a lot. Pioneering Lane Steward Sam Sapoznick talked about the initial "renegade thrill" from painting city streets and the more lasting pleasure of improving bike safety. I agree!
Some pals said: play this word game, obey this rule: each word must have just four byte size (can't have more, can't have less).
Text made thus does come slow; when this rule bans most talk, each idea, each line will take much more time. This game does seem hard; with time, this game won't seem very hard.
What news, then?
- This book list, that took much time, does seem (long last!) near done.
- They said they will make that road anew very soon, post-fire.
- CPLP does name this week -- this tiny part -- Luso fest time; each land that uses this talk will have glee over this fact, each Luso-less land must have some envy.
- Back safe from good airs; also vast falls (very good park), lake with giga-watt upon giga-watt flow (very, very good tour), glad port (trip with Vera plus word game buff), ball game, nice food, book spot, much else. (Good airs host: this lady. Woot!) Gave self-made Luso-only talk: "save free code, stop DRMs!"; guys plus gals that came said they grok what they hear -- "tudo"! (Phew.) Hear this talk soon from FISL site, read soon from EFF's.
- Have many-hour Luso chat with nice lady; only post-chat says: "From back East, live here...". (Also: glad-port folk call thee "thou" lots -- some from this part near Chuí lack "você".)
- Velo news! SFBC work: find road hole, note risk, mark spot, make ride more safe. Also, have long July bike ride plan; here, also, more news soon. Ride each week atop tall hill sure does make this size bike trip seem more easy.
- Next July: Rome?
- Will head back, meet 1997 folk this June (Gill side only this time. Alas.)
- Feel some misc. hope.
One of the odd consequences of the NERT program is that I have, following the recent citywide drill, an attractive, genuine, government-issued photo ID card that, as far as I can remember, I did not have to provide any proof of identity to obtain.
I recently heard several more reports of reasons that the ID checking at airports doesn't accomplish its stated goals of stopping particular people from flying. For example, Boing Boing reported that a TV station made its own IDs that were accepted by airport screeners. Last week, I decided to try flying with my NERT ID to see what would happen; my NERT ID is more "valid" than the IDs the TV station had (although it looks much less like a driver license).
The screener at the Oakland airport looked at the NERT ID very skeptically for about a full minute; I had resolved not to volunteer any information about it until and unless she asked me a question. After reading all the text on both sides, and presumably noticing the reference to "San Francisco Fire Department" and "Office of Emergency Services", she let me through without asking anything.
The screener at the Tucson airport was more skeptical. She said "Can I see a driver's license or something? Because I don't know anything about this." I said "Well, it's a government-issued ID." The screener said "Is it issued by a state or Federal government?" I said "No, a local government -- the City and County of San Francisco." She didn't clarify whether she thought local government ID was or was not valid, but she continued to ask for a state-issued ID, so I showed her one.
That's the first time I've heard an airport screener refuse to accept an ID merely because he or she was unfamiliar with the kind of document presented!
I did drop by the Maker Faire this weekend, and the coolest thing I saw was the Cyclecide rodeo, a whole set of traditional amusement park rides, all of which go at least as fast as their traditional versions but all of which are unconventionally human-powered by stationary bicycles. I really wanted a chance to pedal a few of them and spin myself (or other people) around, but the lines were too long. It was a beautiful spectacle to watch, though, and everyone seemed to be having a great time.
The second coolest thing I saw was the 3D printing section, including great mathematical sculpture and a remarkable commercial printer (under $20,000) that could print arbitrary objects, including complete interlocking gear trains, in a single pass. It used a firm but water-soluble material for the negative space so that you could simply wash the negative space away from your completed project. It's strange to think of 3D printers available in the price range that color laser printers occupied in recent memory. (I wonder if the 3D printer manufacturers are getting any pressure to include forensic tracking mechanisms in their printers to help identify who printed a particular object.)
When I was in Arizona I saw a really cute desert lizard and reflexively remarked "Salve, lacerta!". ... No answer.
(In the style of Rachel Chalmers, I recount this conversation with no comment, other than this sentence. And this sentence fragment, and the following sentence fragment:)
Eating at La Méditerranée with Michelle:
Michelle: Do you know which La Méditerranée was the original?
Seth: I've always assumed that the Berkeley one came first and the San Francisco one was later. But I don't have any evidence for that except that I ate in the Berkeley one before I ate in the San Francisco one.
Michelle: You know, when you close your eyes, the restaurant stops existing, too.
Seth: A classic example of Berkeleian idealism.
I got my CPR+AED certification this evening. (First Aid is tomorrow evening.) Why not get your certification too?
I just received a 419 scam letter written in bad Portuguese (that seems to have been machine-translated from some other language*) from an e-mail address in Japan claiming to have been written by someone in Ivory Coast who asks me to write him back in English at an address in France.
* almost certainly from English, because he refers to his parents as "atrasados" (late [delayed]) rather than "falecidos" (late [deceased])... Douglas Adams did this joke better.
Alexandre Oliva and Fernanda Weiden of FSFLA, whom I met at FISL this year, have come up with the first Latin expansion of "DRM" that I've ever heard of: "Defectis Repleta Machina". Awesome!
A vast thinker upon belief and hope
Saw limits for philosophy's right scope:
So Richard Rorty lived with irony.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
Inviting children to his house to see
Some daily wonder worked out splendidly:
To us Don Herbert seemed most wizardly.
Timor mortis conturbat me.
In the past three days, I've cycled to the top of San Bruno Mountain, over the top of the Marin Headlands, up to the entrance of Tilden Park, and to the top of Twin Peaks.
I'm amazed that I've become fit enough to be able to write that sentence, but most of the occasion for all this cycling has been my preparation for the Bike for Breath ride I'm going to do next month. That 100 km ride will be the longest I've ever taken. I'm now soliciting donations for Breathe California in conjunction with this ride, so I hope you'll take a look and consider donating.
Kyle McMartin really does look an incredible amount like me (especially when I had a fuller beard).
I should probably take this up on Wikipedia, but the current Wikipedia article on Summorum Pontificum translates
Pro Iudæis. Oremus et pro Iudæis, ut, ad quos prius locutus est Dominus Deus noster, eis tribuat in sui nominis amore et in sui fœderis fidelitate proficere. (Oratio in silentio. Deinde sacerdos:) Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui promissiones tuas Abrahæ eiusque semini contulisti, Ecclesiæ tuæ preces clementer exaudi, ut populus acquisitionis prioris ad redemptionis mereatur plenitudinem pervenire. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.
by
For the Jews. Let us pray for the Jews, to whom our Lord God was first made known, he may grant to them to grow in the love of his name and in faithfulness to his covenant. (Prayer in silence. Then the priest says:) Almighty and eternal God, you who long ago gave your promises to Abraham and his seed, listen graciously to the prayers of your church, that the people you first made your own may deserve to come to the fullness of redemption.
(It's possible that this translation was taken directly the official Catholic liturgy in English, or that it was made by someone on Wikipedia; I don't know.)
This text is contrasted with an earlier text "pro conversione Iudaeorum" and, according to some people, is less missionary or conversion-oriented in its approach, although other people have suggested that "the fullness of redemption" ("redemptionis plenitudo") is a euphemism for conversion and so the text merely appears to be less missionary in intent.
The translation does have a conspicuous omission here: "Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen." is not translated at all. Now presumably "per Christum Dominum nostrum" is meant to modify "oremus" ("Let us pray [...] through Christ our Lord") rather than "pervenire" ("that they may deserve to come, through Christ our Lord, to the fullness of redemption"). However, the proximity of "per Christum Dominum nostrum" would make it likely that someone reading this text in isolation could read it as modifying "pervenire" -- just looking at "that they may deserve to come to the fullness of redemption. Through Christ our Lord." makes it appear that the two concepts are related.
Someone who likes books and computers should be in for a treat.
I got to go for a flight in this tiny Soviet biplane. It was a little weird because the roof was leaking, the pilot didn't close the cabin door before taxi, and he asked some of the passengers to get out and push to help reposition the plane before takeoff.
The plane flies at an amazingly low speed, closer to an automobile on a freeway than a jet. This makes the takeoff remarkably gradual and also makes the landing a bit of a surprise: the pilot can approach the runway at a right angle and then make a quick turn immediately before landing.
The Chaos Communication Camp remains just about the coolest event I've ever attended. It's especially amazing at night. Its only obvious competition is the Rusticatio Californiana (which was going on at the same time this year).
Didn't Don Marti write this article in fewer words about eight years ago?
But I think it's always interesting to have this issue brought up because it's really not something that gets talked about much with regard to the United States or the rest of the developed world. I hear lots of talk about how Linux has a tough time competing with Windows in developing countries where software copyrights aren't enforced (so you can get the network effects benefits of using the most popular thing without paying the royalty the copyright holder is demanding), but I practically never hear the observation that exactly the same considerations may apply in the United States, where software copyrights are rarely enforced against individual end-users.
I still think that one of the most interesting developments will come when many hardware manufacturers offer side-by-side laptop builds with different operating systems and a visible difference of tens or hundreds of dollars in price.
Although I'm very interested in the political dimensions of software freedom today, I remember that, when I first started using free software twelve years ago that one of my motivations, apart from curiosity about the power of Unix, was the high cost of a new copy of Windows from a student's point of view. Don also wrote about this phenomenon -- again, in many fewer words.
I missed the Solano Stroll!
Darn.
I was thinking recently about the famous question of what places Americans can find on a map, so I decided to take a blank map and test myself with no preparation to see how many countries I could label on the map. (How do other people do? You could try to use Inkscape to write labels on the blank vector map.) I was hoping to get over 100, given that there are just about 200 countries in the international system.
Unfortunately, upon completion of the exercise, I fell short by just a single country, getting 99 countries right. I also fell short by a single CPLP member -- São Tomé e Principe -- so I could have reached 100 if only I had remembered all of the CPLP members.
I did particularly well in Europe and South America, achieving nearly perfect coverage of each continent. Apart from the Caribbean and Pacific island nations (many of which don't even appear on this vector map and almost all of which I would have known if they had been present), my weakest spots were:
Central America
Central Asia, especially the former Soviet republics
Former Yugoslavia (I remembered all the countries and their orientation to one another, but I was off by one when I started to label them)
Southeast Asia (I transposed Thailand with Burma and Laos with Cambodia)
Africa (I transposed several West African and North African countries that I thought I knew, and only thought I knew the location of 22 African countries to begin with)
21:39 <paulproteus> This bartending page has been nominated for cleanup for the following reason: "{{{1}}}".
21:46 <@schoen> paulproteus: obviously it needs to be cleaned up because it contains an erroneous use of template markup
I was just reading a blog post by Lauren Weinstein in which he proposes empirically detecting violations of network neutrality -- that is, Internet users would run tests to see what networks are actually doing, so they can tell whether ISPs are violating some kinds of neutrality principles. I think this is a fairly challenging problem (first because of the complexity of defining what kinds of neutrality we're interested in, and second for technical reasons), but there is one particular kind of neutrality that we can observe pretty easily, and a particular tool that would help.
I'm referring to whether ISPs are acting as passive conduits for traffic, delivering packets unmodified and not altering them or adding additional packets (apart, perhaps, from the ways specified by the standards for the very lowest protocol layers). For example, some research on the Great Firewall of China suggests that it disrupts connections that match particular rules by forging TCP RST packets that trick the parties at each end of the connection into hanging up. Other people have written code for wifi routers that will invisibly change the contents of web pages that users view when connected via those routers -- for example, altering all the image files that users load in their web browsers.
Enough end-to-end cryptography could mitigate these problems by making it technically difficult for intermediaries to tell what end-users are doing (and thus much harder to selectively interfere with it), as well as making it difficult to alter data in transit without detection. What can we do in the absence of cryptography? One approach is to capture packet traces at each end and then compare them.
Earlier today, I had an idea for a tool called pcapdiff, which takes two libpcap-format packet logs, one from each of two computers that were trying to communicate with one another, and compares them to figure out automatically whether there's evidence that packets were being systematically forged or altered by an intermediary. Clearly, all networks have innocent packet loss, so the comparison we need is not simply a matter of finding packets in one log that are not present in the other. It's quite normal to have packets sent by one end that were not received at all by the other end. (We can measure the rate at which this happened -- and compute a packet loss rate, which is worth doing with real traffic of various sorts, not just ICMP echo request packets, which networks might treat specially in order to maintain low visible packet-loss statistics.) No, the suspicious thing is when a packet is received at one end that the other end never transmitted. If A remembers sending a certain packet to B, but B doesn't have a record of receiving it, that's OK: it's just a normal dropped packet, and we can measure the rate at which this occurs, and compare it from ISP to ISP, or application to application (to see if an ISP is selectively dropping packets of a certain sort at a greater rate). But if B received a packet apparently from A that A has no record of having sent, that's a problem: the ISP has either altered it in transit or concocted it from scratch. In this case the ISP is behaving non-neutrally, and a tool that compares the packet traces with this criterion could detect this.
The one complexity that comes to mind is that the IP protocol allows networks to fragment packets that are too large, turning a single packet into multiple packets containing the same data payload. In some sense, an ISP that fragments packets is not behaving perfectly neutrally -- it's doing something other than forwarding packets byte-for-byte unaltered -- but the Internet Protocol says that this accomodation for varying network hardware (with different maximum packet sizes) is OK. A pcapdiff tool, or users conducting an experiment with one, may need to take account of fragmentation in some way, either by trying to reassemble fragmented packets, trying to prevent fragmentation from taking place at all (setting the MTU very low on both ends before beginning to communicate?), or by analyzing fragments to see if they are correctly formed and correctly derived from packets that are known to have actually been sent. (If we insist on trying to reassemble packets, there is a potential problem about how to deal with dropped packets.)
Today I turned 28, the second and last time my age will have been a perfect number. Perfect numbers are so rare that the human lifespan only lets us experience two of them as ages -- six and twenty-eight. I didn't know what a perfect number was until I was nine or ten, so I missed out on the opportunity to celebrate being a perfect age last time around. Not this around. Adsit omen!
I celebrated by riding my bike to the top of Mt. Diablo for the first time. On the mountain, I saw two tarantulas, three bats, and a coyote. Two days ago, I rode to the top of Twin Peaks at midnight and saw an owl; following Rachel Chalmers's view of the auspicious nature of seeing an owl while exercising, I'll say again: Adsit omen!
(It's more correct to say omen accipio, but I like the symmetry with absit omen.)
While I was doing bicycle training this spring and summer, I found myself riding up a lot of hills and little mountains, and I decided that I wanted to ride up Mt. Diablo by the time I was 28. After a long enough while had gone by, there was only one day left in which to do it.
Thanks to Peter for being my guide and companion on the ride.
I forgot to mention that I also saw a snake on Mt. Diablo.
I was talking to someone about how the Portuguese "força" (feminine singular) is a reanalysis of the Latin "fortia" (neuter plural) because one neuter plural ending "-a" in Latin looks like one feminine singular ending "-a". I think I learned this in Jozsef Herman's book. I said that I had another example but couldn't think of it.
Earlier today I was on a bike ride and the example came back to me -- "obra" in Spanish and Portuguese is a feminine singular meaning "(creative) work", a reanalysis of Latin "opera" (neuter plural). I've periodically complained about an old Microsoft ad in Wired which tried to pluralize "magnum opus" as "magnum opii" (nope, the correct plural is "magna opera"); on the other hand, I guess misconceptions just like Microsoft's ad agency's are what got us modern Romance languages...
This is tangentially related to my previous post, but perhaps in the other direction.
The Wikimedia Foundation is having a fundraiser and asking users of Wikipedia and other projects to donate money. I was just looking at the Latin Wikipedia and noticing that the fundraising appeal has been translated into Latin there: "TU Vicimedia in mundum ameliorando adiuvare potes! 14 589 [homines] donaverunt. Dona nunc!" "YOU can help Wikimedia make the world better! 14 589 [people] have donated. Donate now!"
I was wondering about why "Vicimedia" has the form it does -- it seemed difficult to interpret "Vicimedia" as the benificiary of help. After a while I realized that the translator interpreted "Vicimedia" as the plural of a hypothetical "Vicimedium" ("Wikimedium") -- one Wikimedium, many Wikimedia -- on the basis that the English "media" is historically the plural of "medium", like "communications medium"/"communications media".
If "Vicimedium" is a second-declension neuter noun, like "medium", then the plural "Vicimedia" can be either nominative or accusative, and hence it can be the accusative object of "adiuvare", to help. But something seems odd to me about taking the English word "Wikimedia" to be plural, maybe especially because we don't ever use the singular "Wikimedium". In a sense, the translator has noticed that the collective Latin plural "media" is being reinterpreted in English as a singular noun (U.S. English often has "the media is"), and decided to halt and reverse the process when writing in Latin, explicitly making "media" plural again (with slightly more obvious grammatical consequences). Or maybe the translator speaks an English dialect in which "media" is still always plural -- "the [wiki]media are" correspondingly cleanly and unremarkably to Latin "[vici]media sunt".
My dad and his neighbors are in the New York Times today. See also the story about the Pioneer Valley area and the piece about rare book dealers. I've met about half of the dealers mentioned in these articles and heard the names of practically all of them regularly when I was growing up.
There is something oddly hilarious about looking over these linguistic coincidences, like learning that there's a language where "beter" means "worse" or "bhlak" means "white". Maybe it's a kind of nervous laughter in the face of the unfathomable prospect that "they are merely conventional signs!".
By the way, arigato/obrigado has turned out to be another of these coincidences, despite the real influence of Portuguese on Japanese.
I wonder how Southwest's Spirit Magazine managed to produce an entire magazine article about fan fiction without ever mentioning sex or copyright.
My article about detecting packet injection by ISPs is now on the EFF web site, along with Peter's article about what Comcast has done and an initial release of pcapdiff, largely written by Steven Lucy with some help from me.
I know the ancient Romans thought envy was particularly unlucky, but I was amused to see that Lewis & Short offer, among their definitions for "invidus", the remarkably contemporary sounding "a hater".
Happy International Year of Languages! I plan to spend lots of time studying language to celebrate.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
