Older blog entries for schoen (starting at number 215)

Hmmm, talk about honesty: I dropped some cash at an ATM two weeks ago, and somebody found it and sent a check and a narrative of the incident to my bank's "Department of Mislaid Funds", which looked everything up, figured out who I was, and sent me the check along with this man's note about the circumstances. I'm extremely impressed.

I hate the DMCA, I hate the DMCA

async, your objection has been raised on dvd-discuss before; take a look through the archives.

Judge Kaplan said this issue was still theoretical, because there are no works under a TPM which are in the public domain. Some people on dvd-discuss have disputed this and found examples of things which seem to be public-domain works encrypted with CSS.

Housing

My new landlord accepted my housing application.

CalLUG

The CalLUG meeting Tuesday night in Berkeley was remarkably well-attended.

I had an argument with a couple of people there about the idea that random data is incompressible -- in particular, that any fixed compression algorithm will "almost certainly" be unable to compress random data. (I need to read Chaitin and Kolmogorov and get some more details.) Some of the people at CalLUG seemed to think that any data can be compressed (presumably by an algorithm specified in advance), which is the exact opposite of true. In fact, almost all data can't be compressed.

From a discussion at CalLUG about copyright law: "The thing is that when somebody stabs somebody, the RIAA doesn't lose any money." "There would have to be a court case to decide whether they were actually friends."

Trips

Some people have subscribed to my seth-trips mailing list. I'll probably announce a book-hunting trip for this weekend and some other kind of trip for the weekend after.

I wonder if I could catch up with Bennett Haselton if I went to the NAS censorware conference in Redwood City tomorrow.

I finally made it to Serendipity Books in Berkeley, and was suitably impressed. I bought El Aleph by Borges; no, I don't read Spanish, but I really like Borges. So now I can quote that passage in the original, even:

En el primer volumen de Parerga und Paralipomena releí que todos los hechos que pueden ocurrirle a un hombre, desde el instante de su nacimiento hasta el de su muerte, han sido prefijados por él. Así, toda negligencia es deliberada, todo casual encuentro una cita, toda humillación una penitencia, todo fracaso una misteriosa victoria, toda muerte un suicidio.

I had an interesting appointment at the doctor's with much discussion of the big picture.

In the first volume of Parerga und Paralipomena I read again that everything which can happen to a man, from the instant of his birth until his death, has been preordained by him. Thus, every negligence is deliberate, every chance encounter an appointment, every humiliation a penitence, every failure a mysterious victory, every death a suicide.

(Jorge Luis Borges, "Deutsches Requiem", in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings)

(I quoted this in e-mail Sunday evening.)

Does anyone here have any knowledge or experience about methyl sulfonyl methane (MSM)?

David Gelernter's epigraph to Mirror Worlds

No changing of place
at a hundred miles an hour,


        You can't imagine how strange it seemed
        to be journeying on thus, without
        any visible cause of progress
        other than the magical machine,


nor making of stuffs a thousand
yards a minute,


        with its flying white breath and
        rhythmical, unvarying pace,
        between these rocky walls, which are
        already clothed with moss and
        ferns and grass;


will make us
one whit stronger, happier
or wiser.


        and when I reflected that


There was always more
in the world
than men could see,
walked they ever so slowly;


        these great masses of stone had been cut
        asunder to allow our passage thus far
        below the surface of the earth, I felt that


they will see it no better
for going fast.
JOHN RUSKIN (1856)


        no fairy tale
        was every half so wonderful
        as what I saw.
        FANNY KEMBLE (1830)

Still delayed with some last-minute stuff. Sorry. I do still have an ISO image up for beta testing.

Wrists

Actually, hands, wrists, arms, shoulders...

Ouch! But I finally have an appointment with an occupational medicine specialist on Monday so I can get a real diagnosis and referrals or recommendations. I've put that off way too long.

Apartment

I really like my new place a lot. I think it was a nice choice. Now I need some visitors, but I still have lots of unpacking in the meantime.

I got some more components at the Radio Shack around the corner; I'm edging closer to making some little projects with TTL chips.

Going places

In a moment either of wisdom or of hubris, I asked Zack to create a mailing list for announcements of trips that I'm going to take. The idea is to invite friends and acquaintances to accompany me on excursions (most often to bookstores) by posting announcements in advance. The result is the seth-trips mailing list. It could be the start of a nice tradition.

We're taking a trip tomorrow (to which the public is not invited this time) to visit some of Zack's relatives. It will be nice to get out of San Francisco and healthy to get away from keyboards.

In other news

I had a nice chat on Friday which I should probably not describe here.

Celestial mechanics

Can somebody please give Christopher Mann (or me) a closed-form parametric solution to the two-body problem, either in polar or Cartesian co-ordinates? We want to know the position of each body in a classical two-body orbit for all time, as a function of time.

This has got to be an extremely standard piece of knowledge in physics, which a little calculus could yield readily from Newton's laws or Kepler's, but Christopher and I have both forgotten huge amount of physics.

And February was so long that it lasted into March.

(Dar Williams, "February")

In world news

The latest depredations of the Taliban.

I picked up Edwin Black's new book IBM and the Holocaust.

Also, I moved.

Claude Shannon recently has died
Who in the Forties had studied
Communication entropy:
Timor mortis conturbat me.

"Hmmmm, a random surface-mount video processing chip of some sort. I don't know what it does. Did I tell you I feel kind of geeky sometimes?"

Lots of moving. A Mover is coming by Tuesday to finish it off.

That might make going to the Dar Williams concert on Monday kind of tough, unless I don't want to sleep.

The new place is very pretty, and I put up some decorations here, from electromagnetic and sound spectrum charts to "Jon Johansen is watching you" to the "What's the best way to get a cookie named after you?". I also live really nearby a supermarket now, which is very handy.

Zack and I actually went back by the book fair, and he had a nice time looking at a First Folio.

My RSI pain is coming and going -- some of this may be strains from carrying heavy things over the weekend, much as I'd resolved not to do that.

Skud, thanks for the advice about peppermint. I'll try that.

Hall Effect Sensors

Yay!

Thanks to Duncan, Chris, and Zack, I managed to move a lot of stuff and am now staying at the new place, a very beautiful house in the Mission District. I like my room. I have an unobstructed view of Sutro Tower, which would mean that I would have fantastic TV reception if I wanted it.

Ask Advogato

How can you keep ants away without killing them? (I already know about not leaving food out.) The new place has a lot of little ants wandering around, and I'd rather they just wandered outside.

Book fair

I'm hoping to go back to the fair with Zack tomorrow morning and try to get on the mailing lists of dealers who specialize in things I'm interested in.

After that, I'm going to need to keep packing; I'll still have about 20 boxes of books at St. Francis Place to move. I hope my new landlord is willing to give me a lease, so that I'll actually be able to keep living here. If all goes well, I'll hire a moving company to bring over the last of my stuff on Tuesday.

I found a letter I wrote to a friend in 1995 and accidentally never mailed (it was still in a sealed envelope with her address on the outside!), so I'm planning to send it to her now. Talk about high transmission latency!

I had a really nice time at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, the largest antiquarian book fair in the world. I went with Anirvan. (Anirvan also brought me a couple of plush gnus at work, saying "It's great to be the bearer of good gnus". He's so right.) It was really amazing, and fun. (If you want to see any of what I mention below, the fair will be going all weekend in San Francisco and admission will be $5 on the remaining days of the weekend.) So, speaking of book prices, it was the first time I ever asked the price of a book and got an answer with six digits.

The legendary Simon Finch was there in person, exhibiting wonders such as

• a third edition of Newton's Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
• a first edition of Newton's Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
• a fourth edition of Dante's Divina Commedia
• a first edition of Fermat's Variae Opera Mathematica
• an edition of Aristophanes printed by Aldus Manutius in 1498 (perhaps you've heard of Aldus, or a computer program named after him?)
• Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, & tragedies: Published according to the true original copies; that's right, a First Folio Shakespeare (!!!!!)

Highlight: I mention to Simon Finch that I have seen a 1967 facsimile edition of the De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius. (Actually, ten minutes later, I would bump into the dealer who owns that copy.) "Oh, I have a first of that", says Finch, "I think it's in this box." He rumages in the corner and comes out with, sure enough, a first edition of De humani corporis fabrica, which he lets me look at.

I found a dealer (Michael Thompson) who has an excellent collection of books in the history of philosophy, history of mathematics, and history of computation -- definite collecting areas of mine. I bought from him a first edition of Shannon and Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Yay!

Shannon's book is quite interesting, and very highly recommended. I almost said "informative". Ahem. According to what I can find on the Internet, Claude Shannon is still alive (unlike W. V. O. Quine, who died two months ago).

# In memoriam W V O Quine
Q = "# In memoriam W V O Quine%cQ = %c%s%c%cprint Q%c(10, 34, Q, 34, 10, 37)"
print Q%(10, 34, Q, 34, 10, 37)

Mr. Thompson has for sale an original copy of the issue of Mind containing A. M. Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". It could be yours for only $15,000.

One dealer I met has a book by Porphyry called De non necandis ad epulandum animantibus, which is awesome except the edition's apparently in French and costs $850. Otherwise awesome.

I met up with six dealers who knew my father; three of them also knew me.

Ken Lopez: "It's like being in a museum, except everything is for sale." The copy of Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand gave to Ludwig von Mises. Signed works and letters by Freud, Einstein, Darwin, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (!!)...

I sent in my housing application.

Thursday, a packet of laser pointers, a copy of The Best of Leroy Anderson, and a couple of VT520 terminals came in the mail for me.

Christopher showed me some problems he's working on in celestial mechanics. It made me realize that my actual exposure to planetary orbit calculations in physics class was really weak: although we saw the derivation of Kepler's laws, we actually dealt directly only with circular orbits, which are very easy. (Linear and angular velocity are constant; angular displacement is proportional to time; kinetic and potential energy are constant; the force of gravitational attraction is constant. None of these things is true of a planet in a non-circular elliptical orbit, and I actually don't know much about how to calculate several of these quantities as functions of some of the others.)

it's funny -- I definitely thought I understand classical planetary orbits before!

Free speech on holiday

No Free Speech Activity shall be permitted between the day after Thanksgiving and December 26th of any year.

(County Fair Mall, Woodland, CA, "Application And Request For Permit to Engage In Free Speech Activity")

For example, this is not a free-press case simply because defendants posted DeCSS software on their magazine's web site. Defendants did not "publish" DeCSS on the Internet in the sense of conveying a message to readers through an electronic medium. Defendants instead exploited the Internet's technical capacity to supply operable software to users through the process of downloading. In other words, defendants used the Internet as their vehicle for distributing prohibited technology, much like a delivery truck.

(Mary Jo White, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Brief for Intervenor United States of America, Universal v. Corley)

Step right up! Ladies and gentlemen!

Come one, come all to the book fair!