The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Andart, another self-confessed addict, pointed out to me that I
(like many humans) am addicted to existence. Are you? Check the signs:

• Existing more often or in larger amounts than intended.
• Unsuccessful attempts to quit; persistent desire, craving.
• Excessive time spent in survival.
• Feeling existence at inappropriate times, or feeling fear when existence is threatened.
• Giving up other things for it.
• Continued life, despite knowledge of harm to oneself and others.
• Marked tolerance in which the amount of life needed to satisfy
• increases at first before leveling off.
• Characteristic withdrawal symptoms (fear of death)
• Continuing existing to relieve or avoid fear of death.

For those of you who may not closely follow space exploration, New
Horizons is a spacecraft which launched January 19, 2006, and will
fly by Pluto July 14, 2015. Right now it’s flying by Jupiter, with
some awesome shots of the volcanoes on Io erupting.

The Planetary Society sponsored a worldwide contest last year for
images to be placed in the New Horizons Digital Time Capsule. I
submitted one of the pictures I took on my honeymoon, because I
was really proud of the picture and thought it was a nice summation of
(one part) of life in 2006.

They picked my picture!!! It’s in the Technology section,
labelled picture d.
My name is even there, with my not-so-excellent prose trying to
explain why I thought it was a good picture to select. Look at them
soon—they’ll disappear in a month and be hidden until 2015.

Yes, I know the picture is in Brian’s photostream, but I took it. He
posted all the honeymoon pictures

It’s funny that after watching this
video
assembled by, one assumes, a strongly partisan anti-Democrat, the only
one of those candidates I’d be willing to vote for is Kucinich. I’d
rather see a better candidate than that, but it horrifies me to hear a
candidate for President say that health care "will be provided for
every American."

Hillary Rodham Clinton is not a foolish person. She knows there’ll be
real costs for that health care: somebody will have to pay. Who?
Every American! So how can she say this? The only reason I can
see, like the only reason to be making promises to retreat from Iraq
within the first 90 days of a term that begins in 2009, is to gain
power. These mentions of policy decisions aren’t about real
policies. They’re about lies to the gullible in an attempt to get
elected.

I’m horrified, because there’s an excellent chance that one of these
people will be the next President. Who among the candidates is even
a little bit honest? Guiliani may be a bit of a fascist, but he’s an
honest man and a capable leader. Dennis Kucinich is more than a bit
of a fruitcake, but he’s an honest man and a smart one. Who else? I
can’t tell about Barack Obama, and that worries me. McCain, Clinton,
Romney? Even if I favored their policies, how could I trust they
would be enacted?

An article on SPACE.com with the headline Milky Way Fortified with Calcium
caught my attention. Apparently "The calcium atoms in
the hot gas emit X-rays with a specific wavelength, which can be
detected with instruments aboard ESAs XMM-Newton X-ray observatory."
That in itself is very very cool to me—astronomy using spectroscopy, though I
understand vaguely how it works, still seems a little like magic.

This morning, while getting ready to leave the house, I said "Self,
you have nothing for lunch, and the cafeteria sucks." I saw the
container of Israeli Cous Cous, and was Inspired.

I put 6 tbps of cous cous (~ 1/2 c) and some red pepper, oregano, and
garlic powder into a bag, and threw the bag into one of my giant
teacups. Then I took the teacup to work. When I got hungry (which
was around 1:20, well after the cafeteria had stopped serving) I went
to the little store and got some hot water. Here, I realized my
error: no lid, and I can’t get a plate because the cafeteria is
closed. But necessity is the mother of invention, and engineering
ingenuity knows no limits, so I have lunch.

Cous Cous @ Work

• 1/2 c cous cous

• spices to taste

• microwaveable (or at least heatproof) cup

• If you have a source of really hot water (ideally boiling), pour
  about 1/2 c of water into the cup. Otherwise, boil some water in the microwave.

• Pour the cous cous into the cup. Cover with a napkin.

• If your water isn’t quite boiling, heat 30s in the microwave. Walk
  fast back to your desk

• Cover the cup and paper towel with a notebook you don’t mind
  steaming. The plastic three-ring binder of specifications and
  standards works great!

• Wait ~ 10 minutes. (Cous cous is supposed to take 5, but I found
  it needed a little longer because it wasn’t as hot as it should’ve
  been)

• Enjoy!

Nutrition:
130 kcal, 5g protein

The Boston Globe and the Tech both have front-page stories
this morning about the arrest of three MIT students who were caught in
the MIT Faculty Club after hours. According to the Globe (which,
in typical Globe fashion uses the word "pranks" rather than "hacks" or
"hacking") the students set off an alarm which alerted the Campus
Police. They were found in the Faculty Club, one with an L-slide
(which can be used to open some kinds of doors.)

Usually, this would result in a fine, or, for a first
offense, community service. This time, the students are being charged
"trespassing, breaking, and entering with the intent to commit a
felony" and "possession of burglarious tools for having the slide"
according to the Tech. What felony? That’s unclear. The Tech also states that
"It is not listed in any court documents what felony the police are referring to."

This all makes it very clear that the MIT Police are not happy with students
exploring campus. The ambiguity is in the messages sent by other departments:

• The Alumni Association has regularly used images of famous hacks as
  fundraising and publicity material.

• MIT Admissions maintains a webpage about the hacking tradition,
  which uses an image of a recent hack (the MIT Fire Truck commemorating
  9/11) as its banner. Hacks regularly appear on the Admissions Blogs like here and here

• Former President Charles M Vest has written publically about his
  appreciation for the hack on his office on his first day as
  President.

So what’s MIT’s real stance on hacks and hackers? We’ll see as the criminal case shakes out.

Yes, quoting a Slashdot article again:

According to recent research by the U.S. military and CERT, workers
who sabotage corporate systems are almost always IT workers who are
disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with
colleagues, and generally perform poorly.

There’s the obvious joke in this post’s title. But there’s a more
serious complaint here as well:

I would be much more interested to see the correlation the other way.
Being able to predict lateness and grumpiness after previous events of
sabotage is not very useful. It would be useful to know if most
disgruntled, paranoid, generally late, argumentative, and off-key IT
workers later perform sabotage. It might be useful to know if a
substantial minority of such persons become saboteurs if mistreated,
and whether this can be avoided by proper treatment.

But what good is it to know that saboteurs were once surly? There are
too many surly IT workers to dismiss them all, or even to apply
selective treatment around dismissal time.

From a thread on rpg.net, I begin to see why Exalted has some of the
disconnection it does. It doesn’t make it a bad game, but… well,
look at this quote from John Snead, one of the authors:

…As long as there are applicable stats (charisma and wisdom
primarily, and a variety of social skills (bluff, diplomacy, gather
information, intimidate, & sense motive) then you have all you need,
the rest is roleplaying, which for me is far more important in social
sequences than in combat, because social sequences are the more
interesting portion of the game, and thus the place where I want rules
to have the least affect. I love Exalted, but I’ll never use Social
Combat, and argued successfully against anything remotely similar
being included in Blue Rose.

I do not in any way understand the idea that the focus of the
mechanics are the focus of the game, for me mechanics should be easy
and fast (both true of True20) and should serve to specifically handle
those sections of gaming that are not the primary focus of the
campaign. The major (and fairly long) climactic scene of the best
session of Blue Rose I ever ran involved not a single die roll -
everyone deeply got in character and roleplayed marvelously, which was
especially surprising since it was at a convention game at Origins,
and so was with totally unfamiliar players. In any case, so-called
"mechanical support" would have gotten in the way and made that scene
far less interesting and powerful than it was.

Anything this man writes about mechanics or system is going to be
worse than useless to me. I’ll need to excise it from my game, since
it’ll be otherwise constantly getting in my way. I want rules to
mediate and schedule the interesting parts of my game. If we’re
bargaining for influence, make it currency! If there’s tactical
positioning to do, give me a map and some system for movement.

The funny thing is, he’s a systems guy. He wrote a bunch of the magic
rules for Dying Earth, and they’re fantastic. They’re not the core
of the game—that’s snide remarks and hat design—but they’re
certainly important to getting the feel right.

I wonder if part of this is due to different definitions of "system".
After all, the most fun part of Shadowrun is the prep and planning.
There’s no dice-rolling then, but plenty of IC arguments… backed up
by a rich system of price and availability. When it starts to get
un-fun, an OOC argument over wise plans, is when I find myself wanting
more system, not less. By calling on a system agreed upon in
principle beforehand, we resolve a conflict and get back to the fun
part. I think we’d agree that the latter part is system, but I’m not
sure he’d see the former as system. He might characterize it as a
very well-established setting.

I don’t have links to the threads mentioned above handy; I’ll edit
them into this post Thursday some time.

Harper’s has
published an
article by Jonathan Lethem on copyright, creativity, plagiarism, and
inspiration. It is amazing. Read to the end.

Apple’s god-king recently announced that he’d be happy to sell
music without DRM. I even sort-of believe him. That is, I believe
he’s not delighted to be a sell-out, and would rather do business in a
Whole Earth-friendly way than otherwise… as long as both are
massively profitable.

Ed Felten at Princeton followed up with his own note on the
furor. I think he misses a point, though. Jobs wrote:

Some have argued that once a consumer purchases a body of music from
one of the proprietary music stores, they are forever locked into only
using music players from that one company. Or, if they buy a specific
player, they are locked into buying music only from that company’s
music store. Is this true? Let’s look at the data for iPods and the
iTunes store—they are the industry’s most popular products and we
have accurate data for them. Through the end of 2006, customers
purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the
iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes
store for each iPod ever sold.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that
the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000
songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from
the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the
music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open
formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average
iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future.
And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from
the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes
store to acquire their music.

But he’s trying to slip something by you. Even if Apple strips out
DRM and ceases to hold a monopoly on players-of-FairPlay-music,
they’ll still have the only convenient HW player for AAC. AAC may be
an open standard, but outside of Apple and some weird Archos gear, you
don’t see it at the BestBuy.