Can I hear an "awwwwwwwwwwwww"? *8)

In much more minor news, our narrator in Le diable au corps has, at the age of twelve, sent a love-letter to a classmate, and then there is some rather obscure stuff, in French, that I have not yet figured out.

And this spam made me smile for some reason, so I am sharing it. The original was like triple-spaced (and I have slightly obfuscated contact details, names, etc).

Acme Trading Services
4th Floor, Atlantic House 4-8 Circular Road ,
Douglas, IM99 2BB Isle of Man, UK .
Tel: +44-[redacted]
Fax: +44-[redacted]

We wish to confirm you with full cooperate responsibility that we are end seller ready, willing and able to transact and sell the commodities, with the following specifications, terms and condition.

Sales and purchases will be based on the following procedures: The product is used Train Rail Scrap with the specification of R50 & R65 as confirmed to the ISRI codes.

Manufactured in Russia & Ukraine . The origin is South Africa & Nigeria.

Quantity: 360,000 MT (Three Hundred and Sixty Thousand Metric Tons) Contract period: Twelve Months. Price: USD $ 130 per Metric Ton FOB.

Payment Terms: should be Standard Bank Letter of Credit (SBLC) or Bank Guarantee (BG)

Chemical Composition: International Standard as follows:

R50.67kg/m COST 7173-75

C:0. 67-0.8%
Mn:0. 75-1.05%
Si:0. 13-0.28%
P: max. 0.035%
S: max. 0.045%
Ar: max. 0.15%

R65-64.72kg/m COST 8165-75
C: 0.6-0.082%
N: 0.75-1.05%
Si: 0.13-0.28%
P: max. 0.035%
S: max. 0.045%
Ar: max. 0.15

Please confirm if you are willing to close down the contract as to enable us schedule and arrange for your urgent trip to Africa for inspections of the material and signing of the contract.

Finally, be informed that upon your acceptance to this offer, you will be provided with all the related documents for your perusals before coming down to Africa for the signing of the contract.

For more detail and proceeds Contact person:

  Engr. Nzuma Edwin
Email: engredwin@atlas.cz
  engrnzuma7@live.com

Yours Faithfully

Asher Serah
Acme Trading Services

Disclaimer and confidentiality note: everything in this e-mail and any attachments relating to the official business of Amce Trading Services to the customer is confidential, legally provided and protected by law. Atlas Trading Services does not own and endorse any other content other than the information enclosed on this email. Views and opinions are those of the sender. The person addressed in the e-mail is the sole authorized recipient. Please notify the sender immediately if it has mistakenly sent to you. Do not disclose or use the content in any way. Atlas Trading Services cannot guarantee that the confidentiality of this communication has been maintained or that it is free of errors, virus, interception or interference.

If anyone needs a few thousand metric tons of used Train Rail Scrap, drop me a line and I'll forward the actual details... ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100723.html#20100726 The yellow face, it burns!

This must be, I reflected to myself on getting out of the car yesterday at the Bagel Store to buy bagels and feeling the heat beating down, what is it like much of the time in places where much of the time it is like this.

Whew!

Anyway, I have this book. I took it, on impulse, from the Book Exchange rack down in the lobby at The Lab, because it was thin, and had an attractive cover. I did realize also that it was in French, and that nearly stopped me from taking it, but at the last moment something whispered "be brave!" into my ear.

I sort of vaguely but not really speak French. Where by "speak" I mean "can read", and by "sort of vaguely but not really" I mean that I took it for a number of years in High School, and then took the placement test my freshman year of college and got placed into French 1, and then took it enough in college to satisfy the language requirement, and then stopped.

French has many many words!

This book, which is in French, is called "Le diable au corps", which I take to mean "The devil in the body" or perhaps "The devil in the corps" (Marine Corps, that sort of thing). It is by Raymond Radiguet, and it is a roman, which I remember is French for "novel". The back of the book says that Raymond Radiguet est l'auteur de deux romans (two novels): this one here (qui connut un succèss considérable), and also Le bal du comte d'Orgel (which perhaps didn't connut so much succèss, since the book doesn't say).

I liked the first sentence of the blurb about the book itself on the back, because I could mostly make sense of it, and it sounded plausible.

Ah! que la guerre est jolie quand on a 15 ans et que l'on aime !

which I take to mean more or less

Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and in love!

or perhaps

Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and someone loves you!

or possibly even

Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and how you love it!

hm or come to think of it...

Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and how it loves you!

which choice of translations gives you a reasonable idea of my abilities in French.

I've read about half a page of the book so far, and I am enjoying it very much. Here is my current couple of paragraphs; they are lovely!

Je n'ai jamais été un rêveur. Ce qui semble rêve au autres, plus crédule, me paraissait à moi aussi réel que le fromage au chat, malgré la cloche de verre. Pourtant la cloche existe.

La cloche se cassant, le chat en profite, même si ce sont ses maîtres qui la cassent et s'y coupent les mains.

Isn't that great? Currently I'm reading it as something like:

I have never been a dreamer. What seems dreamlike to others, more credulous, seems to me as real as cat-cheese, or a bag of water. Because the bag exists.

The bag closes, the cat profits, whether or not their masters close them, or clap their hands.

Cat-cheese or a bag of water!

Of course I somewhat doubt that that's what it actually says; but the experience of reading it that way is very enjoyable. It's like being in an odd half-understood waking dream, where the cat profits and its master claps his hands (or perhaps strikes him, or something).

The next paragraph seems to be about how the narrator had a girlfriend called Carmen when he was twelve, which is also promising. No sign of the cat yet... ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100702.html#20100702 To: The Editors, Reason Magazine
Subject: "Where Do Libertarians Belong?" (August/September 2010 issue)

Dear Editors,

Thanks to Brink Lindsey for reminding us just what a devil's bargain the 'fusionist' alliance [between libertarians and social conservatives] has been.

Thanks also to Jonah Goldberg for showing his true colors when he writes that libertarians have a nice comfy home with the Republicans "where it actually matters most: economics". This is typical of all too many self-styled libertarians, willing to turn surrender civil liberties (preferably someone else's) to anyone that will promise to lower their taxes.

And in the same way I will believe that Matt Kibbe's Tea Party has escaped its Republican astroturf roots when the rallies start to feature speakers denouncing the drug war, warrantless wiretaps, and the Presidential power to detain and torture citizens without trial.

But there I go forgetting that that's not what actually matters most...

David M. Chess
Mohegan Lake, New York

(The article in question isn't on the website (yet). I trust the gist is more or less clear. :) ) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100618.html#20100624 I am once again on a train, going from one place to another!

(I was thinking that there ought to be a longer form of "train", like "airplane" or "aeroplane" is a longer form of "plane". I guess it would be "railroad train", as distinct from "wagon train" or "mule train". I am on a railroad train!)

If I were less lazy, I could look it up and see if I've previously observed here that every time I leave Newark Airport I find myself leaving by a completely different path. Either there are some vast number of different routes between the Newark parking lots and the Garden State Parkway, or they change them regularly.

(The problem is compounded by the fact that all of the signage around Newark Airport is regionally idiosyncratic. Rather than saying pedestrian things like "Grand Central Parkway East", the words on the signs are based on regional knowledge, or on some particular favorite small town or fond childhood memory of the signmakers. So you get "Grand Central Parkway -- Long Island", or "Fibbstown / Chutney", or "Aunt Dot's", or "Route 95 -- that burger joint where I met Marie".)

I mention this, not because I've been anywhere near Newark Airport lately, but because the same sort of "different every time" effect occurs at the Penn Station station in the New York City subway. Usually when I get off at that stop I find myself in Penn Station (a different part of Penn Station every time, but at least recognizeably Penn Station). Other times I find myself on some New York City streetcorner within sight of Penn Station.

Today, though, I found myself on a streetcorner apparently nowhere near Penn Station. In fact, from the amount of wandering about I did subsequently while looking for Penn Station, a streetcorner not even in the same borough as, and perhaps not in the same state as, Penn Station. Good thing I had plenty of time until my train.

It's theoretically hard to get lost in Manhattan, 'cause of all the streets run either north-south or east-west, and they're numbered with consecutive small integers. So with just a couple of exploratory one-block walks to get the direction of the axes nailed down, it should be possible to figure out where just about anything is.

But that's only in theory.

Finding myself on I think it was Sixth Avenue, and having some reason to think that there might be a Penn Station entrance on Eighth Avenue, I went a block in the east-west direction, figuring that I'd either come to Seventh Avenue and know I had to continue one block to Eighth, or I'd come to Fifth Avenue and at least be confident that I could turn around and walk three blocks to Eighth. So I approached the next Avenue-axis sign with a certain amount of optimism.

Unfortunately what it said was "Greeley Square", which was less than helpful.

Eventually I relented and, after walking some distance in a more or less straight line in a vain hope of encountering something enlightening, I asked someone waiting for a light to change (or, this being New York, for the traffic to clear).

"Excuse me," I said, "do you know, where is Penn Station?"

He pointed back the way I had come.

"Just go straight," he said.

And I did, for quite several blocks, and eventually there was a corner with a Penn Station entrance on it. So that worked.

It would be good if they would paint, on the pavement or even the sidewalks themselves, Helpful Directional Indications, like "8th Avenue This Way", or even "Penn Station".

Unfortunately they probably don't have the money to do this. And if they did, half the Helpful Directional Indications would probably say things like "Greeley Square". And perhaps "Aunt Dot's". ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100618.html#20100622 Last night I attended the first part of a group discussion of the philosophical problem of personal identity. But I didn't stay long; I made a quick excuse and flew up into the air and teleported away.

Yeah, this was in Second Life, so I could fly, and the moderator was an Amazonian woman wearing nothing but holstered weapons belted around her thighs, and one of the latecomers appeared as a female Green Lantern who twirled on her head for a few seconds before transforming into a small pink snail and sitting on a tree stump. But none of that is why I left (those were all reasons to stay, actually).

I left because (there were other things I druthered be doing, and because) I don't really think there is any philosophical problem with personal identity.

Am I the same person today that I was yesterday? For legal purposes, certainly. For some other purpose, well, I dunno. Is it important?

If what makes me the same person that I was yesterday is mostly continuity of memory, what about when I come half-awake for a moment in the middle of the night, not awake enough to remember anything, or to remember in the morning that I wa awake. Is that still the same person? Well, for legal purposes, almost certainly. For any other purpose, I dunno; does it matter?

If we have a super-scientific process that separates all the molecules of a person's body, evenly distributed from all over the body, into two clouds of molecules, and then fills in the missing halves from a molecule-store, and that results in two apparently identical people, both with all the memories and behaviors of the original, and equal numbers of the molecules of the original, are they both the same person as the original? Or neither? Or somehow one and not the other?

For some reason these don't strike me as particularly interesting questions. At least no more interesting than the question of whether, if you replace the blade of an axe one year, and the handle of the axe the next, it's still the same axe. For legal or ownership purposes, I guess it probably is. For any other purpose, it doesn't matter; it's just a question of what form of words to use in an edge-case that isn't all that interesting.

Even the question of what it would be like, subjectively, to be one of those two people technologically conjured from one person, doesn't seem to me any more interesting than the question of what it's like to be me, right now. Presumably (if the technology actually works as advertised), what it's like is that you go to sleep for a little while, and when you wake up there's someone over there who looks and acts just like you.

Which would be weird, but I don't see any big philosophical implications.

It's sort of like the question of whether a big pile of sand, when divided in half, yields two big piles of sand. I dunno, sometimes, often, it depends what you mean by "big"; whatever.

There are lots and lots of practical problems around personal identity in these hypothetical cases, of course; and to a lesser extent in some real-life edge cases.

If Fred is duplicated, and there are now two people who look and act just like Fred, what is his wife Mary going to do? Presumably she will find them both equally lovable and/or annoying, and they will feel the same way about her. Could get awkward; or not. But is there a deep philosophical problem? Not seeing it.

If Fred was guilty of some crime and supposed to be incarcerated as a result, what do we do now? Put them both in jail for that same amount of time? (Probably.) Put them both in jail for half the time, or put one in jail and let the other go free? (Probably not; but really if you have some reasonably complete theory of incarceration, you can probably read the answer off pretty directly.)

In real life, if someone serving a sentence for a crime has a stroke and suffers actual amnesia, is he now a different person who should no longer be punished? His lawyer is free to try to convince a judge of that, and if you have a good theory of incarceration you can again probably just read of an answer, but is there some deep philosophical problem? And the same for milder questions, like whether promises made before the stroke are still binding.

Subjectivity, consciousness as viewed from the inside, is deeply mysterious in these cases, but then it's deeply mysterious in all cases. Fred's consciousness before and after the duplication seems no more, and no less, mysterious than my consciousness right now. Since I don't understand how matter and subjectivity relate at all, it's not any more mysterious how consciousness gets duplicated when you duplicate Fred.

Of course if it turned out that when you duplicate Fred you always get one Fred and one inanimate body, that would be very interesting. Or you get one Fred and one body that mostly acts like Fred but insists that it has no soul and no inner subjectivity, that would also be interesting. But we're very far from being able to perform that experiment, and what little evidence we do have so far suggests that in fact we'd get two fully-functional and conscious Freds.

So I dunno, maybe I'm overlooking the interesting questions here, but I don't see the question of personal identity as usually construed to be any more interesting or philosophically important than the question of sand-pile bigness.

Explanations of what I have overlooked are most welcome. *8)

Now, about China!

China is, potentially, becoming really strange. The One-Child Policy officially restricts more than a third of the population to having no more than one child (per couple). It was put into place, apparently, for relatively simplistic population-control reasons, but the potential implications are much wider than that.

Most of the people covered by the policy live in cities. The policy has been in place for a bit over thirty years. So a big chunk of the urban workforce that is coming into middle management and significant technical positions in China are only children.

Imagine! *8)

We only children tend to be smart, and spoiled. While we do play well with others, we also tend to be loners. And apparently we tend to like the idea of having only one child ourselves; or at least many of the only children in Shanghai feel that way.

What does it do to commerce and industry when enterprises tend to be run, at least at the day-to-day level, by only children? What does it do to education, to society, to politics?

What, one especially wonders, happens when an aging Communist bureaucracy is faced with a population heavily salted with smart spoiled loners?

It's going to be an awfully interesting experiment... ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100521.html#20100523 Hello again!

The little daughter is back from college for the summer. We went down and brought her and her things home yesterday. While we were down there, the little boy and I got haircuts (while waiting for the ladies to be done in the consignment shop, which takes a surprising amount of time!).

So now our necks and ears get cold. *8)

Today the little boy and I cleaned up fallen branches, and cut logs, from the yard, and the little boy mowed, finally. So the place looks less jungle-like.

On Mother's Day I put in petunias on the front porch. They are even still alive! I am so proud. (Here is M on the subect, with pictures.)

What else what else?

The Jehovah's Witnesses have been coming 'round, pretty much every weekend, and we sit out on the front porch and go through this little book they have, a section or two at a time, about stuff they believe.

It's been going pretty well so far; we are all very nice people and they are not at all aggressive.

Today was probably the most contentious so far, because we started on the "how we know that the Bible is the infallible Word of God" chapter.

I told them that I don't actually believe that, and that the part of the chapter that quotes places in the Bible that say that the Bible is the infallible Word of God did not strike me as very convincing.

The little book says, also, that we know the Bible is the infallible Word of God because it contains scientifically-accurate stuff that people back then didn't know.

It cites one passage in particular, that the nice man had me read aloud (this is one of their methods that has great psychological validity: they get you to say things that they believe, presumably knowing that saying something aloud has great power).

The little book says that the passage in question gets the shape of the Earth right, which is impressive because at the time people had lots of wrong ideas about this.

I was kinda disappointed by it, in fact:

There is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth, the dwellers in which are as grasshoppers, the One who is stretching out the heavens just as a fine gauze, who spreads them out like a tent in which to dwell.
-- Isaiah 40:22, Jehovah's Witnesses translation of the Bible

I pointed out, politely I hope, that there is no astounding scientific accuracy there. A circle is different from a sphere, and "the circle of the earth" is probably just a metaphor, like the stretching out of the heavens like a tent. Or, if the passage is supposed to be taken literally, then even overlooking that a circle is not a sphere, there is the problem that the heavens are not in fact anything like a tent.

Can't have it both ways, I said.

They smiled and basically went on to the next paragraph of the little book.

The man (today the people who came were a man and wife, who've come before when my primary contact can't make it; they are somewhat less convincing than he is, although they are all very nice) also mentioned Leviticus in passing. The little book says that there is scientifically accurate stuff in Leviticus about "quarantine and hygiene" that people in general didn't know at the time, and intepreted broadly that may be true. On the other hand, Leviticus also contains some weird stuff about how women are "unclean" for a week around menstruation, and anyone who touches the bed of a menstruating woman has to wash all of his clothes, and so on.

As far as I know that's not scientifically accurate at all (menstrual blood isn't particularly infectious); it's just that these particular nomads found it icky.

I didn't bring that up with the nice people today, though.

I finally watched Primer on Netflix Live or whatever it's called. It was good! You should watch it.

It was also very confusing, but that was the point, really.

Also it was very good for having been made on a very tiny budget by a very small number of people. A good example.

I do want to know what the deal was about their handwriting getting worse; I wonder if that was an idea that the writer / director decided not to go anywhere with after all.

I wonder if Netflix Live has "Memento"... *8)

I am writing very short sentences tonight! ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100430.html#20100505 Many things have been occurring again!

The little boy has had his Carnegie Hall debut. Really! Well, not all alone on the stage juggling eels or anything, but definitely up there on the stage among the basses, playing music with the best of 'em.

That was neat. (M has pictures!)

M and I dropped him off at the bus and then drove down some roads in a generally southward direction until we were in Manhatten. We parked in a place that lets you park if you pay them (Early Bird Special!), and then we walked around.

We went to the American Folk Art Museum, which is near Carnegie Hall. It used to be called the Museum of American Folk Art, but they changed it.

For the obvious reason. *8)

(I can think of two possible reasons: to be nearer the beginning of alphabetical lists, and to make it ambiguous whether "American" modifies "Art" or "Museum", thus giving them more leeway to display non-American (or even un-American!!) artworks. More explanations may be available on the World Wide Web, but I am currently sitting in the lounge at the music school again (the same music school as previously, although in a different building, thus raising interesting questions about identity over time), and their wireless is either too weak to reach the laptop here, or not sufficiently promiscuous for me to connect.)

Ummmmm, what? Oh, right! The American Folk Art Museum was having various inneresting exhibitions (exhibitions? shows? something like that), including one all about folk art by women (M's favorite part), and one all about what the famously unusual Henry Darger had hanging on his walls, and one Approaching Abstraction, which was probably my favorite part.

Approaching Abstraction was all full of more or less nonrepresentational folk art, which is slightly unusual or at least atypical or astereotypical. Folk Art is usually associated with roosters, people riding sleighs, flowery quilts, and so on (although come to think of it crazy quilts and other geometric or otherwise nonrepresentational quilt patterns are examples of folk art where abstraction isn't particularly surprising; how about that!). But this exhibition was all full of variously nonrepresentational flat art and also sculpture, ranging from geometric or mathematical to wildly expressionistic to just plain odd.

It was great!

I particularly liked the stuff by Eugene Andolsek (here's the American Primitive Gallery's section on him; read the words and then click on "works"), which are gorgeously colorful and intricately precise and completely abstract, and also the Philadelphia Wireman (wikipedia entry, as updated by me after we got home, unless someone's reverted it).

These (and for that matter Henry Darger, although he's been a bit overexposed I think) are fascinating both because of the art (which is cool, evocative, neat, beautiful, unique, enigmatic), and because of the stories that the art comes embedded in (in which the art comes embedded).

We love stories 'round here!

Eugene Andolsek would sit at his table after work, with a ruler and pens and ink and I think graph paper, and create goregous things to help him escape from or otherwise cope with his day job and taking care of his ailing mother, and then toss them into a corner or a closet or whatever, because he was all about the making of them, not the end products. And when eventually his mother died and he retired, and he kept making them, and finally in the nursing home a caregiver noticed the amazing things he was doing, apparently he said he thought they might make pretty placemats or something.

Or, as it turned out, get shown in art galleries all over th' place.

No one knows who the Philadelphia Wireman is, or was, or whether it was one person or more than one, whether it is, or was, a man, or even from Philadelphia. Someone just found these hundreds and hundreds of lovely odd intricate little, well, scuplture, art, things... in some garbage bags in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.

Has anyone written a book about that?

There were also, I recall but can't find in the online catalog, a few strange little sculpted insects or montsers made out of who-knows-what, glued-together castoffs, like but unlike the Wireman's works, sitting in a glass case, with a card saying that they had been purchased at some time in the past, at some random tag sale or something, and no one really knew who'd made them or where they came from or what they were.

This reminds me, come to thnk of it, of my own first NaNoWriMo novel, with its dirty subterranean room full of mysterious anonymous sheets of paper, covered with odd pictures and odd words.

So maybe I like these things because they resonate with some features of my internal landscape.

Or vice-versa.

So anyway now I am back home with a network conneciton an' all (I have scrolled upward and filled in the link to M's weblog where the pictures of the little boy are). And I will close with today's Selected Viral Memes:

• My personal favorite o' the day, th' Facebook grou An Arbitrary Number of People Demanding That Some Sort Of Action Be Taken; join us!
• The one you've probably already seen just today: Telephone: the Afghanistan Remake,
• Recently expired: Boobquake (via a Dale Innis photo),
• And today's Classic Meme: Boxxy, just because.

Also, hi! *8) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100409.html#20100411 If you are reading this, I have remembered how to update the ol' weblog! *8)

We just got back from the new Alice in Wonderland. It was fun!

Notes:

• Shouldn't it have been called Alice in Underland?
• The monster is the Jabberwock, dash it, not the Jabberwocky! The latter is the name of the poem. (The little daughter says that they must have known this, and varied it for some conscious aesthetic reason; I agree with the first bit, but so far can't imagine what the reason would be.)
• The little daughter is, by the way, home visiting from college, and it was all four of us, and The Boyfriend, at the movie, and that was fun.
• I think I have seen too many movies (although I really haven't seen that many all told). These days I always feel like the action is a bunch of stock scenes glued together ("okay, Crisis of Confidence here", "okay, Battle Scene Part where the secondary character suddenly appears and saves the day here", "okay, plucky female eye-candy here"), and what differentiates the movies one from another is mostly just the special effects.
• Speaking of special effects, given how much build-up we had about the Vorpal Sword being a powerful force on its own, I'm very surprised that in fact it did nothing to speak of that any other sharp metal thing couldn't have,
• And speaking of plucky female eye-candy, Mia Wasikowska is, I have to say, gorgeous; the camera loves dwelling on her face and shoulders, looking fresh and plucky and un-made-up (through, I kinda suspect, the expert application of make-up), and generally swoon-worthy,
• And the White Queen was definitely evil (she made me think of Tim Curry in Rocky Horror somehow, but M says I'm just weird); I was pleased that she didn't officially turn out to be, though; a little moral ambiguity is good,
• And finally, how did they do that with Helena Bonham Carter's head?? I mean, zomg! hahahahaha!

All sorts of various other things have occurred. I got in a car crash! I did not lose my hair, but the airbags did deploy, and that scratched up my arms a bit and dazed me, and I got an ambulance ride and some x-rays, which showed that I was just fine.

My old (1996?) Honda Accord wagon, on the other hand, was not so fine; just replacing the air bags would have cost more than it was officially worth. So now I am driving a zippy new Honda Civic sedan or whatever it's called, which is a nice deep red color (M's idea, I promise!), and gets 'way better gas mileage, and isn't all full of junk, but still makes exactly the same old noise when I open the door with the headlights still on.

So that is all good.

Work has been crazy busy, I am "leading" a "team" of people who are making "software", which is a computer-thing. This has involved doing "email" and "programming" and "PowerPoint" far into the night now and then, but I have still had time for far too much World of Warcraft (mostly Spennix), and in some sense not really enough Second Life; it's better and more worthwhile in some deep way, but when I'm sufficiently tired, just running around mindlessly grinding honor or running instances in WoW is where I often find myself.

Or napping. *8)

There've been various other things where I've thought to myself "I should write that up for the weblog!", but then I always forget them. They were probably about politics and popular culture and stuff; you know.

We've had some days of lovely cool sunny Spring weather here. This makes me feel simultaneously energized and sleepy, both in a good way. I sit there feeling the air and looking out the window and thinking "I should get out into the woods!", and then I play WoW and take a nap.

Which is all very nice, but doesn't get me any exercise for body-maintenance purposes. So I still do try to get to The Gym three mornings a week, and usually manage at least two.

And now and then I still write in the secret Second Life weblog, although not all that often there, either. I've been meaning to write something about Linden Lab's new Third Party Viewer Policy, but so far it's never quite bubbled up to the top of the queue. Over, say, napping; or actually using a Third Party Viewer to dive into SL.

So anyway! to close with some aforementioned Popular Culture, here are: If I were a Deep One (from Shuggoth on the Roof), and Cthulolita, just because... ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100212.html#20100217 So I got one of these:

the other day, mostly for curiosity and fun, and for the fact that you get a cute WoW pet for signing up, and perhaps tangentially to make it less likely that someone will steal my WoW password somehow and hence all of my gold.

Over the weekend I showed it to the Research Director of the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection at Dartmouth, who was baking a pound-cake in my kitchen at the time, and he was amused.

The fact that they are using two-factor authentication, we remarked, means that my bank tab in World of Warcraft (holding various tabards, magical gems, spare weapons, armor, raw meats, many many saronite bars, and stuff like that) is in a real sense more secure than my Web bank account out in real life (which, after all, holds only money).

Most likely it's more secure than your real life bank account, too, although when I was talking about this with a top programmer at IBM's major East Coast research lab (haha, this is fun), he pointed out that Paypal and some banks (mostly outside the U.S. from what I was able to find casually on the web) are also using it (and some have been for awhile).

So if you're using one of those, you may be as secure as my bank in Ironforge!

Although of course things can still go wrong...

(Interesting how most of these stories I'm finding are from like 2005 or 2007; what's been going on since then?)

Speaking of two-factor authentication, I've been reading Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" (a copy of which has, appropriately, appeared in my office via mysterious channels), and it's great, and also awful.

(Just as the other books of his that I've read have been, really.)

It's great because it's an adventure, it's escapism, it's wild and wooly and you know the good guys are going to win (even if some incidental good guys get killed along the way), it involves mysterious catacombs and historical buildings in Washington D.C. and oxygenated perfluorocarbons and Albrecht Dürer prints and stuff like that.

And it's awful because, well, it's awful. *8) As in the previous books, many of his characters are supposedly super-smart expert genius types, but for narrative and plot purposes they are constantly overlooking obvious things, making unwarranted assumptions, and generally behaving cluelessly. I'm not sure if it's because Brown actually underestimates how smart smart people actually are, or if he wants to let the reader feel superior, but either way it's annoying and/or amusing.

In "The Lost Symbol", the good guys are trying to unravel a centuries-old secret which is protected by a puzzle at about the level of a Sophomore Scavenger Hunt, or the Daily Crpyto-Quote underneath the crossword puzzle in your daily newspaper.

While I was sitting there waiting impatiently for Brown's hero Robert "Mary Sue" Langdon to realize that "Franklin Square" isn't necessarily a street name, I had little flashes of similar novels in alternate universes...

Balanced precariously on the balcony high above the rubble-strewn street, Robert thought furiously. "It isn't an eye," the mysterious voice had whispered over the radiophone. The world's finest minds had been puzzling over that phrase for hours now, roused from their beds by the joint FBI-CIA-NSA-NBC task force that had formed around Robert and his extreme cleverness.

But what could it mean? What wasn't an eye? And if it wasn't an eye, what was it? Could it be a nose? Or a mouth? Maybe a couple of teeth? Or could it be something else entirely, a bit of fluff, a shopping mall, or one of the attractive women who found Robert irresistible?

As the searing heat of the glowing lava began to burn his toes, even at this high altitude, Robert's mind began to swim. It isn't an eye, it's made out of pie, what do I spy? It isn't an eye, aye-aye sir, now what do I —

Wait, Robert thought dashingly, could that be it? Could the phrase be, not "It isn't an eye", but rather "It isn't an 'I'"? The word "eye" and the letter "I" were, after all, what scientific super-geniuses call "homophones", things that sound the same but are in fact different. The word "homophone", Robert reflected, was derived from Greek roots, and Greek was a language that only really elite people knew.

Suddenly, just moments before it was too late to save the world from destruction, he saw the answer. "It wasn't an 'I'" referred to the Crypto-Quote itself! He and the international team of amazingly smart people had been assuming that "W" stood for "I", because the encrypted 'word' WV occurred in the Quote three times, and most two-letter words start with "I", like "in" and "it" and "is".

But now Robert recalled that there were other two-letter words as well. The Hopi wise man that had schooled him in the deep mysteries of the human unconscious had used them: the word "to", the word "no", the word "of". So W in the Crypto-Quote might be T! Or N! Or even O!

While he did not quite see the solution yet, Robert knew that this was just the breakthrough they had been waiting for.

Now if only Katherine, struggling alone in the ruins of the old castle half a continent away, had managed to think of a seven-letter word meaning "a closed plane figure with three or more sides"...

Okay, so that was a bit cruel. Pretty accurate, and also lots of fun; but still cruel. *8)

(And don't get me started on the Terrible National Disaster that the crazy bad guy is threatening to unleash; omg! Maybe I will rant about that when I've actually finished the book.)

As is probably obvious, I actually love books like this, even (especially?) the parts that I rant about the awfulness of.

Maybe I will actually write this one up a bit when I've finished it; it's been 'way too long since I've updated the ol' Book Notes. ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100205.html#20100211 Dear Miss Manners,

What's the best way to point out to a friend that his

    items = []

    for itemdata in initializers:
        global elementmaker
        element = elementmaker.make(itemdata)
        items.append(element) 

could have been written as simply

    items = [elementmaker.make(e) for e in initializers] 

?

I mean, surely no one would choose the first if they knew about the second...

I'm sitting in the little boy's music school again, listening to the plinking and drumming and strumming, writing in my weblog whilst offline.

Things have been busy. I have Challenging New Responsibilities at work, some of which fortunately involve programming. Deminestia is out exploring Outland, being like level 60 now; Spennix is alternating between grinding Kurenai rep (for the riding talbuk) and grinding Netherwing rep (for the riding drake), both of which are pretty intensely boring; Demilaura is level 31 now and has never even seen Orgrimmar, having spent most of her adventuring career tanking random instances with strangers while out, say, gathering herbs in The Barrens.

(Demilaura tanked the Scarlet Monastery Graveyard like three times last night; it's impressive how high the demand for tanks is, and therefore how short the wait time in queues for random instances is. I keep waiting for the tanking to get difficult! Hasn't happened so far.)

Worked from home yesterday 'cause of the snow. (The little boy had a Snow Day.) Got quite a bit of coding done (yay!) associated with the Challenging New Responsibilities. Used the snowblower to move snow about just before it got dark, and then used a shovel to move different (mostly different) snor about this morning before going off to work for a day of mostly meetings (boo!). I will probably do some more coding after I finish writing this (and probably getting home and adding a "hyperlink" or three, and validating the HTML, and posting it).

I've taken to just popping in relatively briefly to Second Life in the evenings, to check my incoming messages and objects and notecards and group notices, and say Hi to any friends that are around, and then going to sleep. And still I don't usually seem to get to sleep before midnight. *8)

Time flies so fast in the virtual worlds!

In the real world, I've received a rather mysterious package of documents and photographs (some of them rather antique stereoscopic prints) related in some way to my famous ancestors Henry M. Leland and his son Wilfred C. Leland Sr. (my great-great grandfather and great grandfather respectively). As well as things like a stereoscopic picture of Wilfred on his favorite thoroughbred horse, there is also a long correspondance in which Wilfred, with the backing of Henry, attempts to get Henry Ford (yeah, that Henry Ford) to make good on the promises he made when buying the Lincoln factory from the Lelands.

(In the stories from that side of the family, the Ford organization is a Major Villain.)

So the little boy has been looking through the box (which reached us by an intriguing path involving a police evidence room somewhere in Florida), and reading on the Web about the Lelands and Cadillac and Lincoln, and reading also on the web the much sparser amount of information we've been able to find about a certain rug factory whose owners fled Beijing during the revolution, and one rug from which we have hanging in the child-side hallway in the house.

Poor children, having narrowly missed enormous wealth on both sides of the family!

But we do okay.

What other sorts of thing might I talk about, sitting in a waiting room in a crowded (crowded tonight anyway, since they rescheduled all of the lessons yesterday because of the snow, many of them to tonight) music school, waiting for the little boy?

In the middle of my typing that question there, it became moot (or "mute", as they say on the Internets), because said little boy emerged from said lesson, and now I am at home. I reckon I will edit this a bit, post it, write some code, potter about the house, and get into SL some before bed.

Take care o' yourselves. *8) ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100122.html#20100124

Under the majority's view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.
-- Justice Stevens, dissenting

Of course that exact issue is unlikely to come up; corporations (probably?) have no particular interest in voting. It's not so much that there are lots of them: it's that some of them are extremely wealthy.

I am, of course, talking about the recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC, in which the SCOTUS has apparently ruled that since spending money to air political messages is speech, and corporations are persons, rules against corporations spending money to air political messages is forbidden by the Constitution's promise of free speech.

I have yet to read the decision, or to think hard enough about how the feelings of impending doom (or, in lighter moments, of the approach of an interesting sf-esque dystopia) that this decision produces in me square with my earlier expressed opinions about how campaign finance laws are just tools for incumbents to use to discourage challengers.

The decision is long, but I encourage people to read it anyway. I also recommend the coverage in scotusblog and on scotuswiki (where you will find links to the decision itself, and reams and reams of related documents and commentary).

Are we now in a race between the realization that corporations are not in fact persons, and the complete takeover of government by those corporations? Or did I just not get enough sleep last night?

(NPR mentions that in th' UK the laws allow corporations to donate to political campaigns, but only with the prior explicit permission of the stockholders, and with full disclosure of amounts and beneficiaries to those stockholders afterward. An inneresting thot.)

On another subject entirely, my cellular phone has begun behaving differently.

When I get a new text message (typically from a descendant telling me where they are, or where they are going to be in the near future), the phone used to beep softly, and put up a big (well, big in terms of the teeny cellular-phone screen) popup saying "New message received, read now?", with a convenient "Yes" button to push.

But now it beeps softly, and displays a little bitty envelope in one corner of the usual screen, and otherwise does nothing special. To see the message, I have to notice the envelope, and press "menu" and "messages" and "inbox" and "select" and "view".

I don't remember doing anything to cause this change of behavior, and M's cellular phone, which is identical to mine except in color and degree of wear, still behaves the old way.

There may be a setting somewhere in the labyrinth of randomly-titled menus of the phone's firmware that controls this, but I'm certain I didn't change that setting on purpose (given especially that I don't know how), and it seems unlikely that I did it by accident (given that I seldom bother venturing into that labyrinth, the world offering so many more-rewarding activities).

Cosmic-ray hit? Random firmware bug reading from an uninitialized variable if you power on the phone when the current time in seconds is thirty-seven more than a multiple of four million? No telling!

Computers are so very complex and implictly stateful.

Imagine if other parts of the world worked like this.

"Hey, I notice your car only has three wheels!"

"Yeah, it's weird. I'm pretty sure it used to have four, but since last week there's only one in the front. It still steers okay, but I'm sort of afraid to go very fast."

"You should take it in for service."

"Well, I did, but the guy said that when he took it out for a test drive, it had the usual number of wheels."

And/or...

"Wow you look tired."

"Yeah, I haven't been sleeping very well. There's something wrong with my bed, and every time I lie down it dumps me off onto the floor."

"Ouch! My sofa was doing that last month, but I gave it a swift kick and it stopped. You should try that with your bed."

Briefly noted: a post on Mildly Diverting leads us to this piece of art which I love for various reasons, and this thought-provoking piece about if and how and whether web content can outlive its author.

And now I will either go back to bed *8) or go grind Kurenai rep in Nagrand, or do something about all of these piles of books, or something... ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100115.html#20100120 Here it is another Wednesday! I am sitting in a train, rather overheated and stuffy but not quite overheated and stuffy enough to go through all the logistics of struggling out of my vest and my wool-flannel shirt and finding somewhere to stuff them and apologizing to my seat-mate for all of the thrashing about.

I was thinking I might take a nap, here on the train, but that's sort of boring, and it occurred to me that having my computer here and all (and the train even having standard electrical outlets for the plugging in of computers at every seat!) I could write in my weblog.

I don't have anything in mind to write about, but as regular readers are well aware that is not a constraint. *8)

Station stop is Wilmington, Delaware!

On the other hand the train doesn't have an obvious network connection, so I can't look up and see if I've spelled "Wilmington" correctly up there. I could ask my cellphone, but that's somewhat awkward and overpriced.

This is why apparently small changes in convenience-related technology can lead to large changes in human behavior and culture!

Usual virtual world updates: Spennix has gotten the Classic Dungeonmaster achievement after soloing a bunch of old-world instances; Deminestia is level 54 or so and has been happily DPSing with faithful Fido the dragonhawk in various instances (mostly lower Blackrock Depths lately), and has learned Dragonscale Leatherworking; Demilaura is level 23 I think it is, and has been bear-tanking quite successfully (did a speed run of Black Fathom Deeps the other night, because the healer was in a hurry and had to leave soon); and Dale is working in a lazy and easily distracted sort of fashion on a piece of putative art that is really more of a toy, for an art show that a friend is putting on next month sometime.

And much of this is reflected in that other weblog.

The non-virtual world has been about as usual, as much as it ever is. The weather has been cold and warm, wet and dry. When it is cold and dry I tend to get nosebleeds; these are especially annoying at, say, 3:30am. Have I mentioned that? There were some Friendly Ladies on the TV this morning, talking about getting nosebleeds when it is cold and dry. They recommended frequent saline nsasal spraying.

I seem to have a Whole Bunch of books queued up (piled up, mounting up) waiting for me to read them; not just the dusty old books that have been in that sort of pile for months or years, but also relatively brand-new books that have come into my possession only recently. I have been reading books a bit, but as usual lately (see virtual world updates above) I have been too busy with other things to romp through them at high speed as I once did.

And yet they seem to arrive with the same insistent frequency.

Speaking of books, I turned on the TV in the hotel last night, and looked at the Scifi (Sci-Fi? SyFy?) Channel. At first it had wrestling, which seemed odd, but later on it had an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Not the old one with the amusing costumes and funny hair styles, but the more modern remake, with the angst and intentionally shaky camera work and stuff.

I know almost nothing about BSG except as a sort of background cultural phenomenon; I think I may have seen the old original campy series a couple of times, but I didn't know what was going on. Coming in in the middle of the modern series, I definitely had no idea what was going on, but I searched around a little on th' "Web", and of course found a Wiki all about the show and the universe, which turned out to have at least one page dedicated to exactly the episode that I was watching, which helped greatly in my figuring out what was going on.

Seems kinda fun and interesting, but I'll probably content myself with just getting the basic premise and storyline from the web rather than actually trying to watch it. Heck, I haven't finished watching my Babylon 5 DVDs from the other year...

Although it's not nearly as common as it once was, some surrealist poetry still slips through the spam filters now and then. One of the more recent:

Latonyaa And for this! He laughed discordantly. The woman looked up again Fayea Nadinea Roba.
Justinea death! What did those yonder know of war? Laraa Melindaa Shannaa.
Charlesa herself. As a matter of fact the forward room, with its huge middle-age Johnathana Domingoa Louisaa.

(The next station stop is Trenton, New Jersey.)

The forward room, with its huge middle-age Johnathana Domingoa Louisaa! ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100101.html#20100106 The other night I tanked for the first time in World of Warcraft. Unlike in the rest of the world, in WoW this does not mean that I crashed, or failed, or got drunk; rather, it means that I was the point-person of a dungeon-going party, the one who gets (and, ideally, holds) the attention of the monsters, taking their attacks while the DPSs (for "damage per second") work on killing them, and the healer works on keeping me (and secondarily the rest of the party) alive.

Tanking is, arguably, the most high-pressure role in a party (with healing a close second), because if the tank dies or just loses control of the monsters at the wrong time, the whole party often dies. DPSing is easy by contrast: you just wale on (whale on?) the monsters until they die, and if anything goes wrong you blame the healer and/or the tank. Ranged DPS, as I've been doing lately with my new hunter, is especially easy, in that you do that while standing as far away as possible from the actual monsters.

(Spennix is a melee DPS, who has to stay close to the monsters to do significant damage, and it turns out I'm pretty bad at that in a dungeon context; the silly mobs move around alla time, and I have a hard time keeping on their tails. But Spennix has always preferred soloing anyway.)

Another relevant fact is that for solo leveling, DPS characters tend to have an easier time; leveling a tank solo is a bit of a pain because tanks don't usually do as much damage and so have a hard time killing things without the help of DPSs, and leveling a healer solo is a real pain, because they don't do much damage at all, and it's hard to heal yourself when a mob's attacking you, so you die alot.

As you might therefore expect, there are alot of DPSs, and they are a dime a dozen when putting together a party; healers are a bit harder to find, and tanks are the ones that you're always sitting around waiting for one of to show up. I've rolled up a few WoW characters with the intention of having them be tanks, but before the latest patch it was too hard to find groups within the limited amounts of time I have to play, so I'd usually ended up changing their talents to make them more DPSish for soloing.

With the new patch, it's very easy to find a party to do dungeons with, and I went in and found one of my would-be tanks, a troll warrior named Daylh, re-spec'd him as a Protection Warrior, and put myself into the Find a Dungeon queue as a tank.

And the party did good! No one died, we did all of the Razorfen Kraul bosses (including a really long boring optional escort quest that I don't currently intend ever to do again), and even though mobs did get out of my control and go after other party members more times that I would have liked, the other party members assured me that this is normal, especially at these low levels where the tank doesn't have all the advanced mob-control abilities that come at higher levels.

So that was fun. *8) And I've just realized that I've never run a Druid, which is one of the classes that can tank, so I'm thinking about rolling up a brand-new Druid, with the intent of starting regular tanking at level 15, as soon as the Dungeon Finder becomes available.

Unless I get distracted...

A couple of items of note from Bruce Schneier:

Quantum Cryptography Cracked, whose best line is:

And it's always interesting to see provably secure cryptosystems broken.

(The spoiler is that it's not the provably secure part that was broken, just the annoyingly practical parts around that which make it actually useful.)

And Christmas Bomber: Where Airport Security Worked, in which Schneier notes insightfully that while the security apparatus did fail in not realizing that this particular guy should perhaps not have been allowed on a plane, the apparatus did work in the sense that it forced the bad guys to use a very hard-to-detect explosive material, which has the downside that it is really hard to make explode (as opposed to simply setting one's underwear on fire).

Which is unfortunately something too subtle for the media to present in a sound-bite, but seems significant.

And finally, Bill points us at another free-on-the-web story of The Laundry, from Charles Stross: Overtime. I haven't finished it yet, but it's good so far.

Whoops! Post-finally, in late-breaking news, I have just noticed that Desmond Shang, who runs the very prosperous an' fun nation of Caledon in Second Life, has now got Caledonia in Blue Mars running. Follow the links on that page to some extremely clear (to me, anyway, compared to what I've seen before) descriptions of how one actually creates content for Blue Mars, gets it up into the platform, and so on.

Very interesting stuff. If Desmond is interested enough in Blue Mars to put in that much effort, maybe I can persuade myself to look at it again sometime soonish... ]]> http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20100101.html#20100104 Today we are going to talk about the Doctrine of First Sale. This is a U.S. legal dojigger, thought up in 1908 and explicitly written into the copyright law in 1976, that says that even though the publisher (or other copyright holder) has pretty much sole control of the distribution of that book you bought at the corner story (or on Amazon), you can still sell it next year at a yard sale, or give it to your brother, or whatever; and you can do this without having to get the publisher's (lawyers') permission.

The Doctrine of First Sale makes good sense from the book-consumer's point of view; it means there can be a lively and laid-back aftermarket in used books, of the kind we (and by "we" I mean "us") so much enjoy and benefit from.

There has long been a story in the area of computer software that the Doctrine of First Sale doesn't apply there, because you don't actually buy a copy of a piece of software, you just pay for a license that gives you the right to use a copy for certain purposes; that copy, the story goes, still actually belongs to the copyright holder. Your typical modern house, in this story, contains a very large number of objects (CDs, some of them in use as wall decor; dusty old diskettes fallen down behind the desk; and so on) that do not actually belong to the inhabitants.

(Or, depending on just where you draw your ontological and legal lines, the inhabitants may own the CDs and diskettes, while someone else owns each particular instance of the bit-patterns on them; we won't go there tonight.)

This story is repeated in very much the same way in every click-through license agreement that you've ever agreed to (as you know, since you have read them all carefully and reviewed them with your legal counsel before you agreed).

But in October of 2009, the Honorable Richard A. Jones, in an Order Granting Summary Judgement in the case of Vernor vs. Autodesk, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington (at Seattle), ruled that well, actually, at least one pretty typical-looking telling of this story is in fact wrong. And that, in at least one pretty typical case where the story says "the manufacturer retains all rights to this software, including this here very copy of this software on this CD, and all you're buying is a license to use it in certain ways", what's actually happening is that, as well as getting a license to use the software, you're also buying that copy of it.

Which seems to me to be important for two reasons: first, it means that the Doctrine of First Sale applies, so you can sell or otherwise pass on the copy that you own (on EBay, for instance, which is what the party in this particular case was doing); and second, it means that some of the stuff that pretty much every retail software license on the planet says, might not actually be true.

I'm talking about this here mostly just to bring it to your attention; I haven't read extensive analyses of the case, or decided just exactly how important I think it is yet. But you should certainly read it too; here's the Order itself (PDF), from the Miscellaneous Internet Free Speech Cases page on the Public Citizen site. (Public Citizen represented the guy selling used copies of Autodesk on EBay.)

The Order is doubly interesting because as well as reviewing the relevant bits of copyright law, it talks both about the precedent that it relied on in making the decision (a 9th Circuit case from 1977 involving movie prints), and about some more recent cases, also in the 9th Circuit, that seemed to find the other way. The Honorable Richard A. Jones concludes that the precedents are irreconcilable, and since in such cases the first (oldest) precedent wins, he finds for the EBay guy, and against Autodesk.

I think it's pretty likely that the case will be appealed; and in any case it should be very interesting to see how this feeds into the general rather spotty and obscure history of software licenses, especially of the "click here to agree" kind.

Speaking of variously-unauthorized uses of digital material, I commend to my readers' attention the two amusing remixes on this page, both of which are well worth watching. And of course this reminds us of the classic Madonna "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" clip, remixes of which may be found on Youtube these days. (I still have the iTunes playlist of 36 different remixes of that, that I mentioned at the end of a weblog entry back in 2003.)

Misappropriation FTW! As they say... ]]>