evil does not announce itself

It was a week or so ago and we were feeling self-congratulatory. The comically bad SOPA bill had been stopped by popular appeal to the Congress.

Google, Inc. was a notable advocate against the bill and used their considerable voice to drive people to be aware of the issue, come to their own decisions and petition their government for redress of grievance. Google was congratulatory of the 7'000'000 US citizens who stood with them to defeat this in the name of "liberty".

But back in Google's own yard, liberty was being threatened not by the Congress but by Google themselves. In a strongly worded statement to a poster on YouTube, Google used language I'd not previously seen used by the firm whose motto had been "Don't be Evil.":

the second great depression

You usually find the seed-crystal of a complex of ideas in the most unlikely places. The other day I overheard an old rant by Penn Jillette where he made a passing reference to the First Great Depression implying that there was or would be a second. Within the last hour I've seen multiple G+ posts about the reported troubles and closures of Sears Holdings stores, and over the last few months I've been thinking about #Occupy, over the last 4 years about the Second Great Depression, and over the last 20 years about what has happened to the global society that has brought us such malaise.

Even if the Fed cannot bring itself to say so, we are in the Second Great Depression; naming the phenomenon something else is just a rhetorical game.

So in the context of all that, I found myself reading the most profound book review that I can recall. As no clear-headed thinker could dispute the simple, self-evident truth of Darwin's explanation, this little book appears to reveal the fundamental cause of what we have allowed the 0.05% to do to the entire world in my lifetime.

I can't read this review for you, and I've not fully wrapped my head around it yet, but this is big, requires no conspiracy, no secrets, no deep cleverness. You may, like me, have to gloss over the initial football analogy, but I'm not even sure that Denning grasps the importance of this.

---

This post was ripped in its entirety from my post on Google+ because there is little permanence to be found in streams. I still have not fully understood the implications of the idea contained therein, but there are hints of this being an explanatory framework that can be applied to systems larger than just Wall Street.

a snail trapped in a man's body

Ever since I was a child, I've been filled with the certainty that I wasn't like other boys. When other boys wanted to play baseball, I felt that bi-pedalism was just not right for me. When told it was bath time, I felt only dread that my protective mucus coating would be stripped from me and I worried yet more about the salt content of the bathwater. When teased by classmates, I tried to retract into my shell only to be frustrated to discover that I didn't have one. But perhaps the most cruel insult was the discovery that did not have both a penis and a vagina and the gonads to match. Fortunately, with the assistance of a support group and a surgeon sympathetic to my plight, I am scheduled for experimental shell transplantation as soon as a suitable donor is found. If you think this is hard to read, think about what it must be like to know that you've been born into the wrong phylum.

Except you can't think about what it is like to be transphyletic, not only is it philosophically problematic, it is a patently absurd claim to even make. So too are the claims of people who believe themselves to be transgender; to say that they are mistaken is generous because to merely be mistaken assumes there could exist a world in which they were correct.

many rivers to cross

Update: Dr. Mesibov was kind enough to review my amateur analysis and has filled in some guesses I'd had to make with hard data. Please see his comment attached to this posting. As the primary point of my note here — the role of hyperbole in popular science writing — seems uncontested I am leaving the post as it was until I can better incorporate his well received corrections.


Someone asked about a story posted in the Science News Blog with the enticing title Mysterious Border Between Two Millipede Species Runs for Over 140 Miles. I've never been able to understand why headline writers need to spice up what is actually interesting science as if someone who is going to read about carrion eating millipedes really needs to be titillated into paying attention. A quick search of the Science News Blog article title shows that the story has already been picked up by multiple outlets.


The article summarizes a paper describing a methodology for gathering data. Although the observation by Dr. Mesibov is of the form “that's a slightly surprising result, I wonder why?” the Science News, like too many popular science accounts tries to sex up a rather mundane story (which is kinda funny for a class of animals that are most easily distinguished by microscopic examination of their penises).

Assuming Mesibov's data are correct (and Mesibov certainly knows his Tasmanian millipedes) it is just a notably  long measurement of the well known phenomenon of parapatric speciation.

As usually happens when a parent species splits into two, hybridization between the species is severely penalized by selection because the mixed genes don't work together as well as those of either species separately. A common example is the human guided hybridization of horses and donkeys to produce mules which are almost always sterile (where sterility is the ultimate penalty in natural selection). Humans have to cause the interbreeding because although horses and donkeys share a common ancestor and are so closely related that they can produce viable offpring they don't — of their own free will — interbreed. In the course of their speciation, selection retained preferences in each that made them want to mate with their own and not across species lines.

I expect Mesibov's preliminary discovery is a result of a few factors: The total range of T. compitale is small (125 hectares, or about the size of a US single family farm) so the ability to gather specimens is particularly good. Contrastingly, although a zone of parapatriation of 100m may sound narrow to us, to a 15mm millipede that's a long distance. 

There isn't a ton of data on home ranges of small earth dwellers because it's kinda difficult to catch-mark-release-repeat with bugs the size of a fingernail. Picking the beetle Abax parallelepipedus as a reasonable arthropod stand-in (biased by ecology to likely having a larger home range than tasmaniosomans) our friend the Black Ground Beetle never makes it much father than 10m from where it hatched over the course of its entire life. So, if you are a Tasmanian millipede with extremely goal directed ancestors, it could take ten generations or more to cross that 100m boundary zone. This multi-generational journey would be rather difficult because somewhere in the middle you're going to have one hell of a time finding a mate.

Is it interesting? Sure. Is it “mysterious”? No. “As yet unknown” is a more accurate description of the phenomenon that Dr. Mesibov reported.

a public apology to a child pornographer

see note below for important disclaimer

It is with reluctance and remorse that I have had to report Brian Rose, self-described Community Manager of the Google+ Photo project for:

1. Knowingly creating and publishing a photograph of a child, apparently in restraints, on a service intended to distribute said image to multiple recipients across the several States.
2. Suspicion of production and distribution of similar works for possible distribution among child pornographers clandestinely through the internet, a known mechanism for trafficking in such contraband.

I do deeply regret that Mr. Rose will likely be subject to:

1. Seizure of his personal effects including his photographic gear and computing devices for use as evidence against him. This seizure may also include the taking of assets at his home and work even if they don't belong to Mr. Rose on the basis that he may have used these devices for criminal ends and that to leave them in situ would give opportunity Mr. Rose or his confederates to destroy evidence of wrong doing. 
2. Police investigation of his at his place of employ and residence, including vague interview of his colleagues, superiors, neighbors, and friends which hint at the possibility of malfeasance, and even the broad nature of the offense to society, while coyly declining to name the suspected offense.
3. Release of Mr. Rose's name and likeness to the press by the police to accompany the allegation of his actions in child pornography. This release will likely be made in order for the police to demonstrate that they are vigilant and dutiful regarding possible threats to our vulnerable children.
4. Personal notoriety resulting from the reported allegations which will become known to his friends, family, community, and business associates present and future.
5. Trial in the "court" of public opinion prior to even being indicted for the allegations.

I do also regret that I am unable to include the offending material or link to said material lest I myself run afoul of applicable law. I understand that this affects the reader's ability to make their own judgment regarding the allegation, but I am quite afraid of having a charge of trafficking in child pornography leveled against me which could severely impact my standing in my community and workplace.

It is an reasonable question as to why I have made this allegation against Mr. Rose despite the pain, expense, incarceration, and corruption of his subsequent life as a registered sex offender that may result. My primary motivation is a poster on a wall in Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil:

Don't Suspect Your Friend… Report Him

which I have long taken to mean that I shouldn't presume to judge my fellows but to instead yield that responsibility to the state because they can always be trusted to do the right thing. I also do feel for Mr. Rose as being the public face of Google+ photographic policy, in particular being charged with promoting community in the face of Google's confusing and confused photographic censorship policy. It is my hope that through my actions Mr. Rose will be empowered to act in accord with his titular responsibility.

Finally, I think it the duty of concerned citizens of the world to speak out against evil where they suspect it as a means of promoting the general welfare.

Some people, noting the sardonic tone of this essay will conclude that I did not actually file formal allegation against Mr. Rose, and they're almost certainly correct^†. However, times being what they are, I could be the sort of person that I satirize herein, but you don't know.

Like the capricious and arbitrary policing by Google of their service, the lack of transparency, trial by allegation, the stance of "guilty until proven innocent, unless we decide to reverse ourselves at whim" and Google's history of tying their determination of in one realm (G+) to that of unrelated properties (e.g. Gmail and Docs) that is the problem. No, Google is not the government, does that mean they should strive to that minimal standard of "just" or should they aim higher?

^† I did not, and would not, make formal allegation against anyone for expressing their views. I did intentionally mischaracterize the unnamed photograph in Rose's stream for rhetorical purposes; it is a good photo and not harmful to anyone under any rational perspective. Of course, as a citizen and parent if I truly did believe that there was any child who was being abused in any way that I could mitigate through my actions I would be obliged to do so, but to reiterate, Mr. Rose did not do anything that hints at malfeasance or even mere impoliteness. To the best of my knowledge, and by my presumption, he is as fine a person as anyone can hope to be. The photograph that accompanies this essay is not mine but has been copied from his public profile under US terms of Fair Use for criticism and commentary in accordance with 17 U.S.C. § 107, the rights-holder cannot be determined.

what censorship really looks like

For the last couple of weeks, I have been receiving notifications from concerned organizations of what "the internet will look like if SOPA passes". Although attention getting, they don't present the most accurate picture. And then hours before the Stop Online Piracy Act is passed by the fair Congress who calls the entertainment industry "master", an abuse of existing bad law shows up on my virtual door step. This is what SOPA style censorship would look like, except far more ubiquitously:

Here's the problem. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 is also considered to be a bad law written and paid for by the entertainment industry. Under the terms of the DMCA, a company need merely claim they hold a copyright interest in the infringing material, and the hosting service is obliged to "take-down" that content or lose their defense that they were merely unwittingly transporting alleged infringing material. Note the key word "alleged". Prior to the DMCA, a copyright holder would have to provide some evidence that the material was infringing their copyright; after the DMCA their word was considered good enough.

What has been censored here? You have no idea, and if SOPA passes, you'll might not even be able to find out at all. Fortunately as of this writing, a smaller body than YouTube is still hosting Tech News Today 391 so you can still see what the kerfuffle is about. At about minute 26 in TNT#391 there are three journalists talking about the abuse of the DMCA in the takedown of a different video.

And here's the kicker, UMG then told YouTube that the journalistic criticism of UMG by TNT infringed UMG copyright. What have they infringed? TNT doesn't know, because they didn't have to be told, I don't know, and we might never.

The long standing Fair Use Exemption (17 U.S.C. §107) of the US Copyright Act of 1976 has carved out an exception “… for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting…” where one doesn't need to have permission of the rights holder to make a news report critical of the material. But the DMCA is being abused to abridge that provision of law. Remember the take-down displayed above is not for the original material but journalistic discussion about the original material.

This will almost certainly get worse when SOPA is passed. I thank Tom Merrit of Tech News Today for bringing this to my attention.

Occupy Ignorance

photo courtesy of larry rippel

In today's editorial titled "Occupy Elsewhere", the PIttsburgh Post-Gazette unwittingly demonstrates exactly why OccupyPittsburgh ought not and will not vacate the public space that BNY/Mellon claims dominion over. They manage to completely undermine their own claim by the simple expedient of having no idea at all about the core issue underlying the worldwide Occupy movement and the reasons why peaceful protest and a functional free press is essential to the operation of a democratic republic.

The specific ignorance shown by the Post-Gazette pervades the editorial but is highlighted in a single sentence:

The movement's fight against economic inequality and corporate greed is laudable and justified, but there is little to suggest that the Pittsburgh group's continued presence in Mellon Green will advance its agenda.

If the movement were fighting against inequality and greed, it is possible that this claim by the editors could be true. Unfortunately, given a brief three months in which to study the movement, the Post-Gazette has somehow failed to understand the purpose and meaning of Occupy. It would be easy to claim that the last remaining newspaper of daily circulation in the city was deliberately playing the fool regarding their public duty, but I'm going to afford them the greatest possible charity and assume that their specific ignorance is a result of the editors having watched too much television.
OccupyPittsburgh is insufficiently entertaining and therefore must be irrelevant. Ironically, this same cause has largely been blamed for the impending death of the American newspaper.

Who is Arthur Brisbane?

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement citing The New York Times coverage of the protest that almost didn't happen. Since then I have read much, spoken with occupiers and people whom I call “Occupy who not occupy” (of which I am one). I have engaged many in conversation about what the point of the movement is, what is isn't, and  why we should care.

I just read Arthur Brisbane's article Who is Occupy Wall Street? and have had my crucial conjecture confirmed: Occupy does not conform to the conventional framework of modern journalism and will continue to defy the ability of the press to speak coherently about it.

Fortunately, answering my title question is easy as Mr. Brisbane has already done it for me. According to his trade biography, he acts in the role of editorial ombudsman at The New York Times and his credentials and work are formidable. Unfortunately, he has fallen into the trap of attempting to coerce the story into a traditional narrative and in his professional role so guide the work of other journalists. To continue this course does a disservice to the movement and to journalism and I hope to show Mr. Brisbane that there is a more useful way to proceed.

what if they held a protest and nobody was allowed to go?

As noted in the New York Times article “Wall Street Protest Begins, With Demonstrators Blocked”:

For months the protesters had planned to descend on Wall Street on a Saturday and occupy parts of it as an expression of anger over a financial system that they say favors the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens.
As it turned out, the demonstrators found much of their target off limits on Saturday as the city shut down sections of Wall Street near the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Hall well before their arrival.

I had been only dimly aware of the protest better documented at its home site than I can do justice to. A brief except from their intent I do much agree with:

We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.

I've yet to see how the members of the protest make sense of what transpired today, but I think they were witness to an archetypal example of that which they are opposed to.

…getting ready for breast cancer awareness month

I was trying to figure out what ribbon to get, being bored with the pink (and it clashes with almost nothing I own) so I think I shall either get a purple or pink/blue/yellow with clouds, one of which may be for Alzheimer's awareness but I forget which since they've run out of colors. Contrariwise, I can raise awareness of very many worthwhile causes with just one ribbon, so it is highly economical too.

Then I ran into the Think Before You Pink Campaign and am now confused as to whether to subscribe to the beliefs of the Breast Cancer Action Project or the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month Partnership.

...exploring a world of legos

Usually late to a trend, I was reading too many references to a game called Minecraft that seems to have captured many hard-core gamers despite its comical simplicity.

Well perhaps it is comically simple for some as I am an abject failure so far and have resisted the temptation to look up "Minecraft for the Pathetic Dummy" as I think there is hope.

At present, my first goal is to "attack a tree until it yields a block of wood". Where "attack" means pound with your fist. You can see the representation of my fist in the lower right corner of the image.

Although I've beaten upon trees until my hand substitute ought be bloody, the wood eludes me. However, all is not lost as I have learned valuable skills upon the way:

• I can punch flowers and sugar cane very effectively
• I can punch the wool right off of sheep
• Same for the feathers off a duck
• I can annoy cows and pigs at will
• I can dig up sand
• I can shred tree leaves like a panda

But I think I am most proud of:

• my ability to pound upon a tree until it explodes, nearly killing me, creating a hole, clods of dirt, and not a single block of wood

And at night Kokopelli comes and shoots me to death with arrows. But my will is strong, and life is but an illusion and so I continue in my days of constant desperation seeking exactly the right tree.

Spoiler after the fold:

Zur Einführung des Narzißmus

A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal, “I would like to give you this personality test”, said the outsider, “because I want you to be happy.”

Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster, saying: “I wish the toaster to be happy, too.”

– Gary Drescher legendarily in MIT folklore

On the recommendation of friends, I have recently listed myself on an on-line site to ostensibly meet people. This is a bit of a novelty for me as I've not ever actually dated. I've had friends that have turned into lovers and actually find it hard to imagine myself seeking out a person with the intention of mating. So I'm imagining myself as trying to make friends (who are coincidentally female and not romantically attached) because it seems more plausible.


I've looked at a variety of sites from one-night-stands.r.us to seeking-stupid-old-men.with.money to desperation.and.needi.er (Eritrea's Hottest Spot for Singles) with limited success.

Each site has their gimmick, and one that I looked at claims to do a personality assessment, yielded in the form of an astrological "reading" but with worse grammar and punctuation. If you've never heard of the Forer Effect, then I have prepared this profile just for you:

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

Pretty accurate, neh? Well, of course it is as it defines the human condition in a way both vague and pointed.

So this site asked me some questions and then yielded a profile of me. I was vaguely impressed for about the first two sentences and then remembered Forer. So I put the question to you, dear reader, which of these three profiles best describes the me that you know?

flat affect and semantics in Communication 2.0

The exchange between us was brief:

me: I can still give you a ride there if desired.
him: thx, I'll be going straight there anyway
me: Kk

I didn't even mean to capitalize the first "K" of "Kk", my communicator did it for me. I thought about what my reply meant and had a McLuhanesque realization that, as with any new medium a new variety of discourse is created. And the affordances of text messaging, like every other new technology are slightly different than those that preceded it.

What does "kk" mean and is it different than "ok"? I believe there is a difference, both subtle and useful.

A lexicographer would probably point to the "kk" having entered the lexicon of quick messaging as it was quicker to type on limited keyboards. While that origin may well be true, "kk" has since acquired a new semantic which hearkens back to the earliest days of remote communication: simple acknowledgement that a communication has been received and understood.

the story of true: or how to copyright nothing

I stole this logo off the net.

I wish I could find an authoritative reference for this, but as will become clear, it is very hard to search for the relevant bits, so I'll just stroke my hypothetical grey beard and reminisce.

In Version 7 Unix, affectionately known as V7, there was a programmable shell interpreter known at the time as sh or what we now call the Bourne Shell because it was written by Steve Bourne of Bell Labs.

Although programmable, sh didn't have many intrinsics, in large part because memory on a PDP-11 was quite limited and added features would have made the shell too big when its primary purpose was as a user interface for entering commands. It is funny to think of a plain $ as a user interface, but if you had seen the toggle switches, punch cards and Job Control Language contemporary to it, you probably would have been struck by the elegant improvement too.

theodicy for a young woman in pain

People are the best wonderers in the world. We wonder why the sun rises and why the rain falls, we wonder why bad things happen and we wonder what we could have done to make things happen differently than they did. This capacity can - at once - be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.

Some of the questions we ask are easy. The Sun rises because the Earth rotates constantly and changes how it faces the sun. Most every rock in the universe does this unerringly so it wasn't all that hard to figure out. So too have we figured out the rain, winds, tides, fire, atomic theory, relativity, ecologies, and parasites. All of these are pretty great accomplishments which resulted from asking why and then watching the world for its patterns and regularities. It is not enough to ask why, we also have to add causation to our explanations for them to be useful. The Sun rises because the Earth rotates, the tides ebb because the Moon tugs on the Earth.

on the generosity of the artists on the web

A wallpaper created for my Maverick Meerkat desk. This is slightly tweaked from LostAndTaken.com which is the creation of the elegant, prolific, and generous Caleb Kimbrough.  I became aware of LostAndTaken via the blog BitBox which has all kinds of resources for digital art production.


There really isn't much to say other than to thank the kind artists of the world for sharing their work and Al Gore for inventing the Internet.

in which my daughter requests a bulk data transfer

It begins with a mobile voice call:

Me: Dude! Sup?

Her: Can you please mail me dataset 2356?

Me: No, I can't mail it to you, it's about 2 gig.

Her: Okay, put it in my Dropbox then?

Me: Sure, I'm at the grocery store, send me the ID number?

Her: OK

My daughter is 13 years old. Her Dropbox is a secure data server somewhere out in the cloud of the internet. That she called me using her actual voice instead of sending an SMS text is significant: it tells me that this is so important that it needs isochronous response.

I can't think of a single event in my youth that is in the least bit analogous.  Oddly, I'm pleased at the nature of the request. O brave new world, that has such beautious people in't!

of words and presentation

This entry is a prelude to my next entry which wanted to incorporate an idea I had in a university English Composition class far too long ago. I didn't save much of my college work, as it wasn't worth keeping, but this class - and in particular, the instructor, really inspired me. I think I was taking a course in rhetoric contemporaneously, so my thoughts were clearly informed by that.

Through the magic of Optical Character recognition - and Knuth's "Computer Modern Roman" font -  resurrecting my old composition from paper was a trivial effort. I've included it here as an historical artifact. It was written so, so long ago, with a prose style that one would expect of an undergraduate. I've resisted the temptation to revise it so you - gentle reader - may simply wish to skip it and wait for the next post which really does have something to say and will excerpt a couple of sentences from the essay below the fold.

I'm also trying to forget that my copy of this essay has begun to yellow around the edges.

where programming and art collide

I was looking for a higher level abstraction for image creation and finally found one worthy of note. The NodeBox Gallery shows what the toolkit is capable of and is the first accessible drawing library that allows for Tufte's Just Noticeable Differences. I'm only now beginning to explore it, and am uncertain whether it encourages working in JND or the gallery curator just has an eye for such.

In other tech news - by which I mean "news to me" - I'd long had a love affair with the elegance of the TeX typesetting system and the amount of typographical art that Knuth formalized in its page layout algorithms. To my knowledge nobody has bested its running text composition abilities (it may in fact be optimal, see below the fold). But, put simply, TeX is a pain to work with. It is a batch-oriented system dating from the time when editing ASCII markup was quick but page creation couldn't be computed in real time. I'd sort of vaguely thought that computers have become fast enough to do TeX in real-time. Well they had, I just didn't know that the people at LyX had already done it. I was creating good looking documents again within three minutes of installing LyX. I'm perhaps too happy about that.

the 22 minute web application

I've decided that since I write so much about technologies that I was going to start aggregating my non-published works here. Woe betide the gentle reader; I shall look for a way to exclude posts labeled "tech" from my main stream.

This is just a brief note of "cool things I've recently discovered" disguised as shameless self-promotion. As Blogger has done for blogging, so has Google App Engine done for developing and deploying web applications. True, it isn't quite as easy for the computer novice to create an application as it is a blog, but I can't imagine making it much easier for the developer than they have.