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My Great Female Age

Most of the time I wander around blissfully unaware of my age, but at this time of year, I tend to get reminded of it. I’m occasionally frustrated when I realise how old I seem to have got without writing a great epic, curing any disease, routing a dragon, rescuing a damsel, or visiting the moon (let alone punching a shark).

One friend was recently reminding me of matters chronological when, to deflect the weight of implied responsibility to do great things, I decided to point out how much older than me she was. Typically she had a response: since women live longer, in male years (like dog years?) she is younger than me.

Obviously at this point, calculations had to be done to determine if she was right. The fruits of my labour are below. Again, typically, she was right.

The life expectancy values are from 2002 for the UK.

code on jsbin

Technical Consultancy

I recently had the misfortune to experience Dan Browns Digital Fortress. I tend to read low quality books when I’m traveling, for example I recently took in Clancys The Teeth of The Tiger. I don’t recommend either of them.

One of the things that is particularly jarring (apart from Clancy repeating whole paragraphs word for word), is that both authors seem to think of the low quality thriller genre as modern didactic literature. In fact it is quite common that thriller writers take something that the public knows little about, do some cursory research in that field, and then try to educate the public about it. This is not a bad thing particularly, a lot of the physics I learnt came from science fiction books and has stood me in good stead over the years, but for some reason, science fiction writers take their responsibility to include lots of good science in with the fiction much more seriously than thriller writers.

Digital Fortress was particularly terrible for that. The book was roughly a quarter composed of technical information about codes and cryptography, of which I don’t think a single statement made sense. When parts of it contradicted itself, Mr Brown somehow managed to get both parts wrong. Even the central premise of the book was shocking in it’s disregard for basic common sense, let alone domain knowledge.

So, here and now, I want to offer my services to any writer who needs some help to understand concepts in computing or cryptography. I’ll read over transcripts before they are published and I’m prepared to take the necessary time and effort (for some authors a very large amount of time and effort I expect) to explain the concepts.

I’m not sure if I have the right credentials, but since I’m about three times as intelligent as a room full of the “best geniuses in the world” that are frequently gathered together in such books, who even with their “140 IQ”s can’t quite grasp the simplest things, or for some reason take three chapters to see what normal people would see immediately, I should be plenty bright enough.

I’m not particularly an expert on cryptography, about average for a computer professional I would think, but the more expert people I know would have a breakdown trying to work out how anyone could have such a poor understanding of the concepts.

Dan Brown, I’m putting 12 points on your artistic license and sentencing you to 30000 words community service. I will be your parole officer. From now on, do not write stories set since the 1960s without talking to me first.

Imponderables, partially pondered.

Derek Abbott has a hobby of collecting Imponderables. Interesting or unanswered questions. Many of them require specialized knowledge, or more rigor than I’m prepared to put into them at the moment to attack them properly, but here are a few of my thoughts on some of them.

Information theory: Imagine you are an alien from a totally different world – so different that even the building blocks of life are completely different on your planet. Now say that you land on planet Earth. You find three huge sheets of paper (i) one containing English text (ii) one listing a DNA sequence and (iii) one listing a computer program. You have no idea which is which, but you recognize you are looking at ordered bits of information – three very strange and different languages. The question is, using statistical principles and principles from information theory can you (the alien) detect any fundamental differences between the three sheets of paper so that you can distinguish between a human language, a machine language and a biological coding language? Or is it in fact impossible to distinguish them in principle?

Are we talking C or Haskell? Information theory could tell you the level of structure and redundancy in each. My guess would be that entropy could be measured and would go DNA > English > Computer program. No real idea though.

Convention: Why do clocks go clockwise?

I’ve read that this is because clocks were invented in the northern hemisphere and the hands were intended to bear a similarity to the motion of the sun. Pointing south, they go from east to west.

Ethics and Law: Imagine you have been sentenced to jail for 50 years for murder. But you are really innocent (someone set you up). You serve your sentence and when the 50 years is up, you are so angry that you kill the person who set you up. The question is: should you go to jail for a further 50 years or have you already served your sentence in the last 50 years?

On the one hand society owes you 50 years and if it realizes (you find some way of proving your innocence once freed) it should pay you back that time as best it can, on the other hand, I don’t believe that it is appropriate to be able to serve sentences in advance, otherwise anyone who had suffered oversentencing can hold the rest of society to ransom for the rest of his life. Someone could check themselves into prison for beating their wife, and when they got out, threaten the wife with beatings for the rest of her life. Allowing people to receive sentences for crimes they have not yet done, ignores the fact that the threat of committing a crime at some point in the future can also be a terrible curtailment on societies freedoms. In economics, companies can offset debts that may or may not be called in, society would have to do the same with crimes. The purpose of the 50 years sentence, justified or not was to teach not to murder. If someone comes out and immediately murders, then it was unsuccessful, and another sentence is appropriate.

Philosophy: What is truth?
Philip K Dick: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Truth is an expression of reality. People express reality by speaking or acting, nature expresses its reality by being sensed. Since we are incapable of fully expressing reality, any truth that we encounter will necessarily be partial. There is also the danger that any expression will reduce the ability of the mind that receives it to comprehend truth beyond the boundaries of that expression, or around it’s edges. I believe that’s why many mystics find it safer to define the things that are not true rather than run the risk of actually describing truth.

Law and Sociology: It could be argued that when we lock someone in jail for a crime, we cut them off from society and inevitably interfere with any possibility of normal social development of that person, and therefore perpetuate their condition. If the person is a danger to society, is there an alternative?
Although the argument might be accurate, the premise is wrong. Their normal social development so far (they were previously not cut off from society), led them to crime. Since their normal social development was harmful to society (and probably to them), it is sensible to argue that the kind of development most beneficial to them (and society) in future would be different to their “normal”. It’s the exact opposite of perpetuating their condition that is the intention. Is there an alternative to removing someone who is a danger to society from society? Yes, society can simply accept the cost of the crime and absorb it. I think this is a good idea in only a few situations (cycle of vengeance type problems). This doesn’t mean that jail is the best way of changing what is normal for their social development though. Perhaps a loving family environment may be better, assuming that that is not the environment that led to their current social development.

Philosophy: If there were no evil in the world, would good cease to have meaning?
Good would not cease to exist, but if there were nothing to distinguish it from, the word itself would lose meaning.

Law: Many paradoxes in law arise because law is black & white and real life is a continuum of grey. Law takes continuous variables and sets a threshold or boundary. Either side of the boundary is 1 or 0, ie. right or wrong. Is this for convenience because we have no better way or is there a deeper reason? If it is a matter of convenience, can we someday use technology to evaluate all the main variables and produce continuum based laws? Could we trust machines? Would it be fairer than binary laws?
Law is not binary. We already have continuum laws. Every law is required to be applied by a person to situations. Whether or not to apply any punishment in a given situation is at the discretion of a person, and how much punishment is also at the discretion of the judge. Since there are innumerable kinds of situations, situations can arise that were not forseen when the law was created, only a machine capable of understanding the intent of the law and the new, unforseen situation should be trusted (reduces to the Strong AI problem). A fundamental principle of fair laws is that those they apply to should be easily able to understand them.

Game theory: If a country has the capability to fire a nuclear missile at New York city, then conventional game theory seems to tell us that New York should point a nuclear missile at the other country. This creates a stalemate, so that no actions are taken and we are all safe. However, straight game theory needs to be expanded to include error analysis. The question is what if a nuclear missile was fired at New York and was said to be by mistake? What is the best strategy for New York now? From a game theory point of view, should New York still strike back? Also there are two possibilities to consider: the declared mistake could have been genuine or a bluff. Also another related question is that if the missile is intercepted whilst in the air, will the resulting explosion create more deaths and than if the bomb was allowed to hit the ground?
Perhaps the residents of New York should estimate the likelihood that their enemy will trigger the bomb by mistake, and ensure that their bomb has an equal margin of error. This gives the aggressor an encouragement to decrease the error for their bomb (because New York assures them that it will match any demonstrable improvement).

Extra: Irresistible force meets immovable object
Forces cannot be resisted by objects, only by other forces. So an irresistible force is simply any force not balanced by another force. The only immovable objects that can exist are frames of reference, or objects defined to be at the center of a frame of reference – a perceptor. An unbalanced force meeting an immovable object happens every time I drive a car, and what happens is that from the forces point of view, the immovable object moves (it must, unbalanced forces are defined to accelerate), and from the immovable objects point of view (my frame of reference), the rest of the universe moves.

Modding like it’s 1600

One of the most remarkable media players in the world is the xbox media center, homebrew software for the xbox. Sadly it requires a mod chip to run it, as microsoft have code in their console to ensure that only programs vetted by them can run (although see this article for a detailed, but interesting read about the mistakes Microsoft made).

So, what do you do when your friend comes round for a mod chipping party only to discover that your trusty old soldering iron has given up the flux?

Tealights. We should really have made them ourselves from animal fat to be properly hardcore. At least that was my claim, until I was emphatically informed that nothing done with tealights can be considered hardcore.

xboxtealight XBox modding old skool

Portable and Secure

There are a growing number of projects to provide a relatively secure environment on alien, and possibly untrusted computers. This is unsurprising, given that occasionally even the most technologically advanced of us is likely to need to use an internet cafe at some point. The last one I used reminded me a lot of Mos Eisley – “a more wretched hive of scum and villainy you will not see”, only without the cantina music, and with more spyware, remote control programs and backdoors than you could possibly imagine (and I know you could imagine a lot).

When you’re running on such an untrusted computer, it doesn’t really matter if you load up your personal environment on a virtual machine running off a USB stick, if the host has a keylogger, you’re toast. However, it seems to me that it would be relatively easy to make a small hardware device that the keyboard plugs into which scrambles the keypresses, so to the host Windows, you’re typing complete nonesense, but to the virtual machine, which knows what the game is, the keypresses can be decoded back into what you actually typed.

A Genuinely Social Network

Social networking sites should be called “social databasing sites”. They aren’t networks at all, but centrally controlled repositories of as much of their users information as they can get their hands on. Rarely a week goes by that I don’t get 3 or 4 invitiations from various friends to add myself to a social networking site (of course, they all use a different one, and the systems don’t interoperate).

Users want to share their information with each other, professional, personal, photos, etc, and trusting it all to a third party seems the easiest way to do it.

Trusting such personal things to a third party is bad for a lot of different reasons. I won’t argue them here, but let me say : AOL search fiasco, single point of failure, illegal government wiretaps, spammers, indian call centers selling identities, profiling, genocide….

If Knowledge is Power, and Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely, then maybe we should be shying away from providing any third party with absolute knowledge.

I think I started getting a bit concerned about all this when I was about 16 and discovered how easy it can be sometimes to go from knowing next to nothing about someone to knowing their address, what school their children go to, (sometimes their passwords), previous girlfriends, unusual habits, and much more, all with information publicly available on the internet. This was all before Flickr and MySpace and blogging…. Sometimes I do a bit of this as an experiment and every time it disturbs me. If you’re prepared to go a little bit further, I am sure that you can find out much, much more.

All the benefits of social databasing (or building up a complete profile of who a person is, has done and what and whom they know) can be ours without giving up the power over our own destinies.

What we really need is a true social network. Independant nodes, run by diverse organisations and individuals, all talking a common protocol with only a part of the picture. This is the internet way.

The machine that contains all the personal details about yourself can be under your own (or a company representing you as a customer) control. Access to different types of information would be on the level appropriate for your relationship with the person requesting access, with access enforced by public/private key encryption. People contacting you via another, would be able to provide a node address of your common friend, and you could check the recommendation automatically with your friends node.

Your node would also contain authentication mechanisms, a computer readable picture, fingerprint, pin, passwords and phrases, etc. It would provide authentication for a third party if it supported the mechanism, or if they had the appropriate priviledge, provide the data for them to do the authentication. E.g. the airline wants to do a face match. You enter a pin, which allows them access to your standard passport type photo, or their system asks yours if the photo they just took matches.

Each piece of information stored in your node could be certified by another individual/organisations node.

Types of trust network would be available. For example, I trust this man as a host for a good evening out, but not as a business partner. So, I’ve travelled to the other side of the world on business, and would like to meet up with someone in the evening for a chat and drink. I want to search for friends of my friends who are good hosts and friendly, and live in the city I’m visiting. These recommendations are stored on my friends nodes, and I can ask them for info. They will give it if my friends trust me enough, but the matches that my friends give might be completely different if I want to find someone to do business with. What they return from the search would not be any personal information about the target, but a node address within the system. Before a node address is returned, permission to do so would have been requested from that node. My node would contact that node, giving the friends node as a referer, and that node would determine how much information to share based on how much they trust our common friend.

Such a system could also easily incorporate a community credit system.

Routing information would be stored in a distributed hash table, not a central repository, and most people would get two servers providing their information in case of problems with one. This way, you can share your diary with people who should know about your diary, your photos with people you want to know about your photos, your career information, your medical information, your bookmarks. All these social networking sites could continue to exist, and would plug into the same web of personal information, but it would also be easy to run your own, and each social networking site would not actually have all information. The point is that you should have your own control over this data. Ideally, even governments access to your data should be on a need to know basis, and controlled by you.

Pattern Patent

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Jackson Pollack, quoted in Possibilities I, Winter 1947-48

I think that lots of people recognise that in the act of creation the artist may have no concious connection to the thing he is creating. This certainly does not reduce his rights over the final work. In fact, if my artistic method is to fling paint backwards over my shoulder onto a canvas that is swinging on a pedulum from a seizmograph standing on a weather vane stuck in an ant hill, no one will deny my authorship of the result or refuse me copyright protection for it (although they may refuse to pay large sums of money for it). I think I could even hook something up so that it recorded my tossing and turning as I slept and created an art work from that.

Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created, and a work is “created” when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time. “Copies” are material objects from which a work can be read or visually perceived either directly or with the aid of a machine or device, such as books, manuscripts, sheet music, film, videotape, or microfilm…. If a work is prepared over a period of time, the part of the work that is fixed on a particular date constitutes the created work as of that date.

copyright.gov

Since conciousness isn’t necessary for a work to be considered art, I want you to consider a work of sculpture that I have been about for many years. It’s a multipart work, with 10 pieces, I prefer people to appreciate them together, but each one stands on it own as well.

I have managed to create, at massive, but unconcious effort an extraordinarily fine structure on my fingers. I began work on it before birth, and although it’s largely done, I may still change it a little throughout my life. It is completely unique. I know other people who have created a similar work, but mine stands apart.

Although they were affected by my environment as I created them (what art isn’t?), no one can deny that it was me that made them.

Somehow I have managed to express much of my soul in them and with them to the extent that an American customs official I met once could spot my style from just one look at these sculptures, and knew my name.

Now my problem is that I believe this same customs official copied my art. I had not granted him a license to do so, but nevertheless, he made an electronic copy and stored it in a computer system.

What is copyright infringement?
As a general matter, copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html#infringement

To avoid future confusion, I make the following declaration:

I hereby assert all rights in my fingerprints, moral and legal. I am the owner of all creative rights in their regard. I will make copies in a variety of mediums, and will leave them in a number of places for free. You are granted the right to observe them, but not to copy them in any way, shape or form, including making a derivative work from them. Setting them in an alternative context is considered making a deriviative work. Allowing you the limited right to observe them close up, or through the use of electronic equipment does not imply the right to store a copy of them or reproduce them for any reason whatsoever.

If that doesn’t work, then perhaps I can apply for patents on them – there are already over 4 million patents on gene sequences, similar simple biological structures. The difficulties there may be even easier as gene sequences aren’t even created by the patenters, just observed.

Failure

I have failed.

Does it give you comfort to say you have failed?

Comfort? It’s a recognition of fact.

So why do you say it as if it’s an excuse? Do you feel that recognising failure means that you don’t have to keep trying?

I don’t know. I suppose I don’t have to keep trying to never fail now, I can look at myself admitting the truth.

Did you really ever think you would never fail?

Yes, I suppose I did.

Well then, it’s a good thing that you’ve out grown that illusion. Past failures do not let you off the hook. Your mission was always impossible, your strength to achieve it too small. This is not important. Get up and keep going.

Names of Power

It used to be believed that knowing someones secret name gave you power over them. Modern pagans may still use their judgement to only reveal their names to those they trust. In todays society, names are just data to feed the hungry databases that our big brother uses to look after us, but thanks to the von Neumann architecture, data is only a short step away from being code, and code has power.

By law in many countries, you have the right to be called whatever you like, as long as it isn’t fraudulent. I’m seriously considering changing my name to

Adam ”; exec sp_MSforeachtable “DROP TABLE ?”

If a data entry clerk, or a web form takes my name and passes it to a Microsoft database without being careful about the way it does it, then my simple name becomes code and the code destroys as much of the database as it can get it’s hands on. It usually won’t work. Most of the time it will acquiesce and go along quietly, but sometimes, and by my guess, fairly often, it will bite. I expect that it might lead to many interesting stories.

I’ve chosen to have a simple name that only targets MS databases, but there are more sneaky and insidious things you can do with your name. Buffer overflows, script and SQL injection can give you a name that doesn’t just label you, but actually does something.

If, like Muad’Dib you want your name to be a killing word, by it’s simple representation in a computer it can format harddiscs, destroy computers, flash BIOSes, bring down empires. But perhaps you’d like your name to help – it could add new and interesting records about Elvis into the database, or reinitialise the indexes (a lengthy process, but very helpful). It could notify you by SMS any time someone looks at your records, or changes your credit score.

There is no limit to what your name could do. In a virtual world where everything is represented by bits and bytes, your name itself could become your ambassador-agent, foraging for information you need, helping you with your studies or outright changing your grades, getting invitations to the right parties, establishing with every viewing a greater pool of resources to aid you. Seti@Name. You’ll probably want to add some firewall code to protect your good name.

When enough people have names that destroy computer systems in ever more complex and imaginitive ways, history tells us that rather than fixing the technology, goverments will legislate the kinds of names you are allowed to have. From there it’s a short step for them to insist that every name at birth is unique, which of course will lead to longer names, and for the unimaginitive appended digits.

I’m sorry, bob.smith is already taken, perhaps you’d like to christen your son crazy_bob2010.smith instead?

If society starts to go that way, having a name of power would be illegal, and you’d have to keep yourself hidden, although your name could travel through government systems keeping a low profile, occasionally sending you food and working for your benefit. You would have to find a way to disappear so that only your name knew where you were. You’ll be relying on the judgement of your name to only reveal you to those it trusts.

Reification

The embodiment of an incarnation of a realisation of the internal. We seek a daily baptism, an external sign of an inward change. The unreasonable man, that world changer, is responsible for all progress. His curse is the same curse that drives the berserker, the terrorist, the artist, the poet. What is internal must be made external. Our environment must reflect our frustration, our rage, our desire, our perception. Esse est percipi, but to be perceived is to change something beyond yourself. What is internal is hidden, even from ourselves. Selfactualisation, the making of an actual self from the actual made by the self. Every hidden thing will be revealed, or revealed to be nothing.

Expression with integrity and expression without. The joy of matching the outer with the inner is a cornfield parrallax. It is a puzzle finished, a set completed. Scratch on the wall of your cell and make it your own. Scratch on the wall of your T Shirt and make it your own.

Even my justice is that you have made real in you what was real in your victim. Realise what you have done.

Not all mediums have the same worth. Acrylics, oils, words, notes, touches, smiles. Friendships. Some you can ignore, but others you must not. What is expressed is affected by the way it is expressed and the Muse is ready to cut that which has not been transferred to a living medium.

My ringtone, facia, face. My room, my clothes, my home, my homepage. My work. What is to become of the man who seeks to be unaffected and unaffecting of his surroundings? Is he dead? He leaves no mark, but passes through this world and this music like a ghost. He is the cat that walks by himself. Perhaps he floats on the foam of others expression. Can he perceive at all? Disconnection is the myth of independence from transience. It is fear. If I have not love I am nothing.

Fear destroys integrity. If what is inside is rejected, what a rejection that is. False expression is a false protection against true rejection. True love, true life. You may have to choose between being rejected and being nothing. The unexpressed atrophies.

Rage against it, that dying of the light. The external is shaped, but there is a spark that shapes. Give the clothing of thinghood to that which is not. Our canvas road may change us, but as long as there is something to paint, we must go on. Our time is forever, for while there are different inners there will never be a uniform outer. Our work will end only when our vision dies through fear or uniformity.

To be with others while remaining yourself without fear. The challenge of life, echoed anew in every new medium we discover and invent. This is the path of integrity. This is the path to reification and its promise:

Through making real, you will be made real.