Tag: reflections

I found this box outside my apartment labeled, "The Emperor Clothes." Fortunately, the contents were exactly what I was expecting.

  

Surely clothing fit for an emperor. That is of course, if you are fit enough to appreciate them.

I found this headline ambiguous:

Negotiators work on Nth Korea deal to close nuclear facilities

When they say "Nth Korea deal" do they mean "North Korea deal" or "N^th Korea Deal" wherein the latter, N is used a variable to emphasize that there have been so many failed deals that enumeration has become difficult.

This is particularly problematic because both interpretations seem entirely appropriate headlines for the story in question.

I’ve been taking the train frequently lately so decided to sign up for the Amtrak Guest Rewards Program — kind of like a frequently flyer program but without the flying.

When filling out their online join form, I was asked to select a title from what turned out to be a rather extensive list:

Please Select Admiral Airman Brother Captain, USA Captain, USN Chief Master Sgt. Chief Petty Officer Chief Warrant Officer 4 Col. Commander Dr. Father Gen. Hon. Jurist Doctorate Lady Lieutenant Commander Lt. Lt. Col. Lt. Gen. Maj. Gen. Major Master Chief Master Sgt. Miss Mother Mr. Mrs. Ms. Pastor Prince Princess Prof. Rabbi Rev. Father Reverend SIR Senator Senior Chief Sgt. Sgt. Maj. Sister

That will be Princess Benjamin Mako Hill to you, Mr. Conductor.

A number of people in the Open Access movement are up in arms because a large publishing group just hired Eric Dezenhall, a man known as "the pit bull of PR," to tackle the "threat" posed by OA.

One might wonder how a nominally talented PR agent would end with such a horrible reputation. Additionally, since Dezenhall hasn’t actually done anything for the publishers yet, one might conclude that the act of hiring "the pit bull of PR" might have been a bad PR move in and of itself.

One of my pet peeves is people telling a non-native speaker of a language that they have no accent.

Saying that a person has no accent is like saying that they have no temperature. Annoyingly, people frequently say that also.

The solution to a crypto puzzle I helped solve during the MIT Mystery Hunt was "ALMOST PLAGIARIZE DAN BROWN WORK." Seth Schoen did this beautifully with an extremely humorous parody of Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress.

His story, Digital Citadel is extremely funny if you are marginally familiar with Dan Brown and his writing style — and probably even if you are not.

I have not seen a copy of the prize winning entry in the hunt — a story called The Ikea Code — but the excerpt I heard was also hilarious.

Yesterday, I received many requests to post pictures of my rather inaccurate globe. I’m pleased to oblige. Please read the summary I posted yesterday for a list of some of the errors you should have little trouble picking out.

You can click on each cropped thumbnail to see much larger, higher resolution versions of the area and the surrounding continent or region.

Enrico suggested that if the globe was manufactutered in China, Taiwan would be the same color as China and Taipei would be marked as a provincial, rather than national capital. Sure enough, I now have both a good idea of the globe’s origin plus an idea of how to spell Taipei with an o.

I gave a talk at a the Boston Ruby group last Wednesday. The meeting was generously hosted by the Boston start-up Back Channel Media. On the way out, BCM offered attendees schwag in the form of branded inflatable globes and Slinkies. On Thursday, I suggested to SJ Klein and Seth Schoen that we might be able to use the globe as a research aid during the MIT Mystery Hunt. That seemed like a good idea until they pointed out that there were a few inaccuracies on the map.

Sure enough, a quick glance revealed that:

• Burkino Faso is marked as Upper Volta (it’s only been 22 years) with a capital as Duagadougou.
• Rwanda seems to be a small horizontal bar across a country marked both as Ucanda and Buhuno.
• Zimbabn is labeled clearly while Morocco, clearly divided into two countries, is not marked in either of the resulting (and differently colored) states.
• A missing border and a color identical to the ocean (!) renders Egypt completely underwater. Yemen, Iraq, Thailand, Romania, Austria, Croatia, Finland, (whose name is missing), and the eastern quarter of India are better off in that they blend into the ocean but have river colored borders demarcating them from the rest of the sea.
• The Arabian peninsula is host to Qatah, the United Arab Emiraies, and the Saudi capital of Rivaiih.
• A bit to the north, Jurdan borders Irae and Lebanaw.
• The countries Czek and Slovak seem to be located just above Czechoslovakia which, in turn, is just above Huudatn.
• A similar situation happens in Yugoslavia which seems to be next to Monienegro and other more familiar Slavic states.
• Amstercam is right next to the the German city of Roro.
• Swirzerlano sits in the middle of Europe.
• England’s Lworpool and Rirmingham are clearly, and clearly incorrectly, marked.
• Both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States are clearly marked while China, despite having dozens of its cities labeled, is not.
• St. Petersburg seems a full 1000+ kilometers from any body of water and closer to Bellarussian than to a port.
• Lapan shows many cities including Tokya, Kyole, and others — while most seem to be located somewhere off the coast of Lapan in the Pacific ocean.
• The Korean peninsula contains N. Korea and S. Aurla.
• Myanmar is marked as Burma (although I might forgive that one if I had reason to believe it was intentional).
• Malaysia is labeled Malaskia.
• The continent at the South Pole is proudly marked Tarctica.

Of course, this list is extremely incomplete. I’ve barely looked at cities, rivers, and even some country names and I’ve barely looked at the degree to which the cities and labels are correct but incorrectly placed. The full list of errata would, in a manner reminscent of English As She Is Spoke, be very, very, long.

While the globe does not bear any markings of a producer (I wouldn’t want to take credit for it either), a group of us suspected that we might be able to find the country of origin by locating the one country that was represented completely accurately.

We couldn’t find a single one.

I competed in the MIT Mystery Hunt again this year for Codex (this year, we were Codex Ixtlilxochitl). Codex has improved in the rankings every year. This time, we came in second place solving 106 of 108 puzzles in 40 hours — only 90 minutes behind Palindrome (this year, they were Dr. Awkward). I’m very much looking forward to helping Codex improve again next year.

Our team has an interesting mix of free software advocates (e.g., myself, Seth Schoen, Don Armstrong, Dave Turner) and a very large contingent from Microsoft. The effect is pretty impressive. I’m looking forward to the days when we work together on much more than just puzzles.

I noticed recently that often had trouble remembering mnemonics. To help remember them, I’ve started a list of mnemonics that I have trouble remembering on my Wikipedia user page. If there are mnemonics you have trouble remembering, you should leave a comment on my blog or a message on my Wikipedia talk page because it’s possible I have trouble with them as well. If I do, I’ll add them to my list. If they are not even in Wikipedia’s List of mnemonics I can add them so others who forget them also might be able to recall them as well.

One thing I noticed when making the list was that in some situations (e.g., the lists of planets or the hierarchy of the taxonomy in biology), I have no problem remembering the thing that the mnemonics in question are referring to but can’t remember the mnemonic itself. Of course, I can sometimes use the referent as a mnemonic for the mnemonic.

Also, since my list is hosted in my user page on Wikipedia, I should also urge you to considering donating to the Wikimedia Foundation to help support the great work they and to insure that they can purchase the bandwidth and servers necessary to keep Wikipedia going.

In his latest talk Lawrence Lessig spends time defending the use of non-commericial use clauses and goes into detail about how the free culture movement does not need and should not have definitions of freedom. In doing so, he was referring to a public discussion the two of us had most recently in September. While my name was not mentioned until the questions, he implicitly criticized both my freedom definition and my call for any definition at all. As usual, his criticism has made me think a lot about what it is that I’m trying to do.

I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with Aaron Swartz recently where he was also criticizing me for focusing too much on definitions. He was skeptical about my assertion that social movements and freedom movements needed "definitions." I thought about it and told him then that I thought I’d been making a mistake by saying I want free culture movements to have definitions. More accurately, what I want are goals, standards, or ideals. I want to be able to say, "music when will be free when every producer can do A, B, and C and every listener can do X, Y, and Z." I want the possibility of a shared utopianism.

I want these kinds of goals because I believe that these images of what what things might be like if we win is what motivates us to win in the first place. I believe that the idea that, "things might be better" is simply never as powerful as a strong, perhaps even unattainable, ideal that challenges people and gives them something to strive for. The leaders of other successful social movements I know can tell you exactly what they are trying to achieve — although few of them ever will realize it completely. No free culture movement leader can do this with any authority. For reasons I’ve talked about in the past, I think that fact may ultimately make us less successful.

In the free software movement, our most important goal (free software itself) is documented in the Free Software Definition. Even the most ethically motivated among us aren’t perfect — most of us use some proprietary software — but we have an ideal to hold our behavior up to and a method by which we can always improve. Inspired by free software, I unimaginatively said that I thought free culture needed a "definition." I probably could have found a better way to describe what I wanted and I’ll do so in the future. I suppose I should have thought a little more about the definition of definition.

I managed to find the futon we sleep on for $20 (USD) in Harlem. When that mattress got a little compressed and hard, I managed to get my friend Shekhar to loan us his futon and frame for the year. I also found and dragged in a decent fold out bed in New York that we keep in our living room for guests. Last night, I managed to procure a very nice mattress pad for free.

Some might call me the bed winner of the Acetarium household.

I went to buy some pseudoephedrine yesterday because we ran out at home. A sign on the shelf prompted me to ask for it at the pharmacy. They would only sell it to me in small blister-packs and in order to buy any, they wanted to transcribe all of the information on my driver’s license.

A little bit of research reveals that this is roughly connected to the national Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, signed into law earlier this year as part of the PATRIOT act extension. Apparently, pseudoephedrine is used to created (illegal) methamphetamine and meth chemists qualify as terrorists under PATRIOT.

States, however, have gone even further. Oregon has gone so far as to make pseudoephedrine a Schedule III controlled substance that requires a prescription. Many other states, like Massachusetts have made pseudoephedrine a over-the-counter drug that’s kept, well, on the other side of the counter. It was, I think, the first I ever had to buy an over-the-counter drug over a counter. Usually, I just pick it off the shelf myself.

I find that fact slightly humorous. But it hardly seems worth collecting and recording a pile of personal information on every person who wants to buy a weeks worth of cold medicine — particularly when the largest producers of U.S. meth remain outside of the country.

I’m going to be in Seattle between December 16-19 and 26-31 and in Tokyo between December 19-26. I know it’s around the holidays but if there are folks in either place that want to meet up for a keysigning or a caffeinated/alcoholic beverage, or even have me give a quick talk at a LUG or something, it might be a lot of fun. Please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

I am excited to see that a number of local hackers have organized the first Dev House Boston for this coming Saturday. There are many projects I’m interested in but I might try to take the opportunity to work on my iRony Rockbox Installer because it’s likely that there will be many people there with different types of iPods.

If you’re going, I look forward to seeing you there, although I might not show up until a little later in the afternoon.