Nano-Plasm Chapter 21

 

Chapter 21

“We found something in Stewart’s PC”, Pendleton said. “It took a long time to find because in fact it wasn’t encrypted; the cryptographic guys had been all over every file, searching for patterns. They finally got around to looking at the unused, extra space in each file; Stewart had stored an equation in one of those files about how a positive feedback situation could run out of control.”

Gillian blinked. “So Stewart was thinking about feedback. Our UFC forensics people found a picture on Stewart’s laptop in Nepal of video feedback. Let me quickly email our forensics guy and tell him to search for more possible hidden data in those pictures or elsewhere on the laptop or in Stewart’s digital camera. Rosenberg told me he had already done a Steganography scan, but he probably didn’t think to look for additional data in the unused parts of the files.”

Gillian went over to the desk and fired off an email to Phil Rosenberg, the forensics expert:

 

From: Gillian@pr.net

To:  pr@ufc.net

Subject: Re: Stewart’s Camera

Phil,

PMTC Security has found feedback equations in the unused file space on Stewart’s PC. Please check for a similar trick in the files on Stewart’s camera or laptop.

-- Gillian

 

Pendleton talked to Gillian while she typed. “I’ve asked one of Smythe’s apprentices to set up a little experiment for us in one of the product rooms. We’ve done a test that shows what happens when two feedback systems start to interact. We can reproduce the buzzing sound now. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”

Gillian finished typing and then replied, “That’s terrific actually. A reproducible test case for the buzzing sound was what Smythe was working on.  I hope you guys have been careful – we don’t want another fatality from all this.”

Pendleton replied, “We’ve been careful. But it isn’t that big a deal – it just makes a small buzzing sound. Still, as you’ve said before, you never know where something like this might lead.”

Pendleton and Gillian left her room and headed to the central hub. They turned down the purple hall to the product demonstration rooms.

Pendleton stopped off in Room A and picked up the fancy extruding mirror. First he slipped his hand between the wall and the mirror and turned it off – there was no point in having it extrude all over the place while they walked. Then he lifted it off the wall and they proceeded together down to Room E, which contained the more industrial nano-tech equipment.

They entered the room. There was no one else there.

“Langsford was supposed to meet us here. Well, like I said, it’s not really that big of a deal. I can demo it pretty easily.”

Gillian frowned. She wasn’t familiar enough with nano-tech to feel very comfortable with this kind of fooling around. Still, Pendleton had been around nano-tech for years and he seemed comfortable enough. She watched him approach the duplicating machine.

Pendleton turned on the scanning machine and the replicating machine and then pushed them a little closer together. “This is perfectly safe, but, as always, keep a few steps back just in case,” he said. Then he turned on the two machines.

He stepped back a bit, and then turned on the mirror. He waved his hand in front of the mirror and verified it was mimicking his movements. Then he slowly approached the duplicating machine.

“Check this out. The interactions here are more complicated because there are two interacting systems. I’m going to bring the mirror close to the scanning machine – but notice the mirror itself will be trying to make a shape like the scanning machine. We don’t normally put a nano-tech machine into one of these copiers. Normally it would just be a static shape. Putting the mirror in is going to drive the circuitry a bit bonkers and you’ll hear the buzzing sound as the two machines interact. The construction machine, which takes the data from the scanning machine, is also going to get confused, because the mirror will be moving around as the scanning machine scans it and the two interact.”

Pendleton slowly approached the scanning machine. He pointed the mirror at the scanning machine and the mirror extruded to make a shape somewhat like the shape of the scanner. Then he slid it into the scanner, mirror side up, and the mirror extruded upward. A swarm of nano-machines came out of the scanner and started to move across the mirror. This in turn caused the mirror to start to undulate as it responded to the motion of the other nano-machines. A slight buzzing sound could be heard.

Pendleton continued, “The replicating machine gets really confused now. Normally we store the scan and then turn on the replicator, but to save some time, I’ll just let the two things run in parallel. This should be pretty funny looking.”

So far Gillian didn’t see anything funny about it at all, but engineers had strange ideas about what constituted “funny.”

Pendleton pressed a red button on the replicator. A swarm of nano-machines came in from the sides and tried to make a shape like the mirror – but the mirror was undulating – vibrating really – and the nano-machines didn’t really have any solid data to lock onto and replicate. So the nano-machines in the replicator started vibrating too. And the buzzing sound increased.

“Check this out. The machines really hate this.” Pendleton stuck his hand in the scanning machine between the mirror and some of the electronics. The mirror tried to make a shape like his hand but with all of the other nano-machines swarming over it the result was fairly distorted.

“Anyway, that’s the demonstration. As you can see, we now have a reproducible test case for the buzzing sound, so some of our better engineers can start analyzing this and fooling with some formulas and system analysis on how the machines interact. This doesn’t really explain what happened to Smythe, though, because he didn’t have two kinds of machines interacting. He just had one kind of machine. I think someone reprogrammed them somehow, even though, as I said, the whole thing is impossible, except it happened. Because as you can see this is fairly benign.”

Pendleton reached into the scanner to take out the mirror. As he picked up the mirror, the swarm of nano-machines started to move from the mirror and to cover his arm.

“Hey, I’m being scanned,” he said.

With his free hand he reached up to turn off the scanner. He flipped the switch and most of the nano-machines stopped moving. But the ones on his hand kept crawling around.

“Hmm,” he said.

He used his free hand again to turn off the replicating machine. The particles continued to swarm on his arm, even though the machine had been turned off.

“Weird”, he said.

Suddenly Pendleton frowned. “Ouch”, he said. He dropped the mirror, which clattered to the floor.

Pendleton screamed. “Fuck this!” He was staring at his arm. There was an increase in the buzzing sound.

Gillian had no idea what to do. The machines were doing something to Pendleton’s arm and whatever it was it wasn’t good. Gillian looked around the lab. She saw an emergency button and ran over and hit it. An alarm sounded and a light in the hallway started flashing.

“Pendleton… what should I do?”

But Pendleton wasn’t listening. He had dropped to the floor and his face was contorted in agony. Gillian bit her lip to make sure she wasn’t dreaming again. She wasn’t.

As she watched, the nano-machines started to leave Pendleton’s arm. Gillian looked in horror to see that the entire top level of skin on Pendleton’s arm had been stripped away. The nano-machines swarmed onto the floor and then seemed to melt into the ground. There was only one thing left behind: a copy of Pendleton’s skin, reconstructed as if a taxidermist had somehow surgically removed it.

Gillian doubled over and threw up.

Two engineers ran into the room and saw Pendleton. One spoke into a phone and ordered emergency medical care.

Pendleton continued to scream.

All three of them stared. They had no idea what to do.

It seemed like hours but just a few minutes later a paramedic entered the room and shot some morphine into Pendleton.

“What the fuck…” the paramedic said as he looked around. But then he composed himself, and said, “I’ll treat this like a burn.” He placed a cast-like wrapping on Pendleton’s arm to immobilize it. He placed a mitten-like wrapping on Pendleton’s hand. The morphine affected Pendleton quickly and he stopped screaming.

Pendleton looked at Gillian. “This is not my idea of positive feedback,” he whispered, and then passed out.

(C) Copyright 2013 Stephen Clarke-Willson

 

 

Compliments (by Garrison Keillor)

#34.  For fear of what it might do to me, you never paid a compliment, when other people did, you beat it away from me with a stick.  

"He certainly is looking nice and grown up."  He'd look a lot nicer if he did something about his skin. 

"That's wonderful that he got that job."  Yeah, well, we'll see how long it lasts.

You trained me so well, I know perform this service for myself.  I deflect every kind word directed to me, and my denials are much more extravagent than the praise.  

"Good speech."  Oh it was way too long, I didn't know what I was talking about, I was just blathering on and on, I was glad when it was over. 

I do this under the impression that it is humility, a becoming quality in a person.  Actually, I am starved for a good word, but after the long drought of my youth, no word is quite good enough.  "Good" isn't enough.  Under this thin veneer of modesty lies a monster of greed.  I drive away faint praise, beating my little chest, waiting to be named Sun-God, King of America, Idol of Millions, Bringer of Fire, The Great Haji, Thun-Dar the Boy Giant.  I don't want to say, "Thanks, glad you liked it."  I want to say, "Rise, my people. Remove your faces from the carpet, stand, look me in the face."  

- Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

(Some formatting changes for readability.)

Adrenium / Elemental Engine Title List

At Adrenium Games (RIP), we developed the entire Azurik game from soup to nuts in 20 months.  That means starting with empty offices, buying computers, hiring 30 people, and delivering a gold master that went through certification the first time on hardware that had only recently been finalized.

The engine was extended over the years and used in all these titles:

Shipped

• Azurik
• Samurai Jack
• Lemony Snicket
• Digimon Rumble Arena 2
• Sims2 PSP
• Pirates PSP
• Eragon PSP
• Lord of the Rings Tactics PSP
  Over the Hedge: Hammy Goes Nuts PSP
• Indiana Jones PSP
• Spiderman Web of Shadows PS2/Wii
• Princess and the Frog Wii
• Assassins Creed PSP
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine Wii
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine PSP (not the same game as Wii)
• Shrek the 3rd PSP
• Where the Wild Things Are X360/PS3/Wii
• Marvel Super Hero Squad: The Inifnity Gauntlet X360/PS3/Wii
• Marvel Super Hero Squad: Comic Combat X360/PS3/Wii (uDraw tablet)
• Atari: Warlords XBLA, PSN

Cancelled

• Smash Baseball
• Interstellar P.I.G.
• Mary Kate and Ashley (Fizz Factor)
• Ninja Warriors

The ility's

I found this great list of the “ility’s” - the things that make writing industrial strength software hard:

• Reliability
• Integrity
• Usability
• Maintainability
• Testability
• Interoperability
• Flexibility
• Reuseability
• Portability
• Clarity
• Modifiability
• Understandability (isn’t that Clarity?)
• Validity
• Functionality
• Generality

And some that don’t end with “ity”:

• Correctness (but maybe that is reliability?)
• Documentation
• Economy
• Efficiency

Source: “The Profession of IT: Software Quality”, Communications of the ACM, Vol 59, No 9, September 2016, Page 23

Neural spelling corrector

My spelling corrector, which uses a neural network as the underlying algorithm, miscorrects four of the 49,168 words in the dictionary. The thing about this neural net is it is constructed logically rather than from a massive learning set. As an acceptance test, I have it validate that every word in the dictionary corrects to itself. (The “training” of the neural net takes about 100 ms - that is, the time to load the dictionary and make the connections.)

(Try it here: http://ec2-54-221-105-181.compute-1.amazonaws.com/?word=kayler ; put in your own word instead of “kayler”. )

Below are the only errors it makes in my test set of 49,000 words. These words look identical to the neural network. Luckily this is uncommon!

_intended_
_indented_

_unintended_
_unindented_

Benchmarking is fun:

On a Raspberry Pi 3 using just one core, the time to validate the dictionary is 1h 1m 38s. With all four cores running, the time is 17m 26s (not quite a 4x speedup but close).

On an AWS X1.32xlarge instance using just one core, the time to validate is 7m 6s. A single core on the AWS machine beats the Raspberry Pi’s four cores.

With all 128 cores running, the time is 14s. An X1.32xlarge rents for (in late 2018) about $13 / hour.

Raspberry Pi3 single core: 1 hour and a minute. X1.32xlarge at AWS with 128 cores: 14s.

One look is worth a thousand reports

"[...] I visited the troops near Coutances on the twenty-ninth and found an armored division sitting on a road, while its Headquarters, secreted behind an old church, was deeply engrossed in the study of maps. I asked why they had not crossed the Sienne.  They told me they were making a study  of it at the moment, but could not find a place where it could be forded. I asked what effort they had made to find such a place and was informed that they were studying the map to that end. I then told them I had just waded across it, that it was not over two feet deep, and that the only defense I knew about was one machine gun which had fired very inaccurately at me. I repeated the Japanese proverb: 'One look is worth one hundred reports,' and asked them why in hell they had not gone down to the river personally. They learned the lesson and from then on were a very great division."

War As I Knew It, George S. Patton Jr., Bantom Books (Mass Market Paperpback Edition, May 1, 1983)

 

 

---

 

I've been misquoting this:  Patton said one look is worth one hundred reports; I rounded it up, rather liberally, to one thousand.  I probably confused this saying with 'A picture is worth a thousand words' and that induced the rounding error.

 

Regardless of the magnitude of the value of the reports vs direct experience, the lesson is still valid.  Here are other ways of thinking about it:

• "Don't mistake the map for the territory."  (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mistaking_the_map_for_the_territory);
• The second commandment, "Thou shalt not make any graven images" can be interpreted as "don't confuse the idol with what it represents." ((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_make_unto_thee_any_graven_image);
• And Plato's allegory of the cave, where the shadows are mistaken for reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave).

A brief selection from Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt

Economics in One Lesson is a 218 page book by Henry Hazlitt; my wife has an early edition of it.  (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232)   I've never read it, because I've never had to get past the initial premise, which is adapted from an essay by Frédéric Bastiat written in 1848: What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen (http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html).  Also 218 pages doesn't strike me as one reasonably sized lesson.  (My wife found her copy and I flipped through it:  "The lesson" is only about 15 pages; the rest of the book is examples of bad policy.)

I would argue that a major goal of systems programming is finding the unseen behaviors in the code; the obvious stuff is easy.  The unseen stuff is hard.  I think you can replace "economist" with "programmer" and "policy" with "module" in the following.

A letter to a friend about intellectual property

 What is property?  Let's say, simply, it's something you own, and we can tell you own it because you control it.  For someone else to take it, they have to take it by force.
 

Can ideas be property?  Sure, but not because the state says so.  Only because you can control them.

 

First, you can keep your ideas secret.  So you have control until you disclose them.

 

You can disclose them contractually, and try to keep control that way.  That works a fair bit of the time if you're dealing with fair minded people, which is generally a good idea.

 

Suppose you invent free energy.  It converts sand into energy without any pollution.  This has huge value!  You can donate your idea humanity if you want, or you can try to keep control of your idea.  If you donate the idea to humanity, terrorists also get it.

 

If you manufacturer your device, or work with a trusted partners to manufacture your free energy device, then you can try to keep control.  You can only sell it with contractual restrictions against disclosure.  Still, a bad guy would be highly motivated to steal your idea, since for very little work, he would get free energy.

 

You can increase the cost of stealing the idea by protecting the idea with physical restrictions such that stealing the idea for the formula involves breaking and entering and possibly destruction of physical property.  That will give you an excuse to go after him.  Still, say he passes it to a third party before you catch him, and the cat is out of the bag.  Well, that's pretty much going to happen eventually, but ideally, by applying your entrepreneurial spirit, you're already cashing in.

 

If I figure out how to light the first candle ever, that has huge value, even though other candles can be lit from mine without lessening my candle.  Does that mean you can light your candle from mine without permission?  No, it does not - that would involve force.  And I can contractually restrict you from lighting other people's candles with the fire that originated with mine. And I can even make it economically to your advantage to send them to me, by sharing some of my income from my candle lighting business.  Or you can steal the light from my candle, sell it, and cash in, but in so doing you have labeled yourself a thief, so you better decide if it is worth it, since as word spreads, no one will trust you again. And if your candle burns out, and you don't understand how to restart it except by stealing the light from someone else, you're screwed.

 

It's really not fair to talk about ideas as property in a solely abstract way, just as it is not fair to talk about physical property in a totally abstract way. "Property is theft", say the Marxists, but that doesn't mean anything.  "Ideas can be copied without harming anyone" also doesn't mean anything.  It strips away authorship and credit which are hugely valuable to people, and people who appreciate that, respect it.  Other's don't, but they are uncivilized.

 

That's my $0.02 on intellectual property.  Patents are crap, but that doesn't mean there is no such thing as intellectual property.

What is money? Nobody knows

From:  Too Different for Comfort, by Louis-Vincent Gave, which you can read here: 

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2014/01/Too%20Different%20For%20Comfort.pdf

(This post is also about robots!)

Excerpt:

The question of what constitutes money has pre-occupied much finer minds than ours. For example, a wall display in the Bank of England museum notes on the debate on the nature of money between William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox that: “Fox argues, quite rightly, that every note issued by the Bank should be backed by gold. Pitt, on the other hand, maintains that the Bank should issue as many notes as are needed.” 

Obviously, times have changed and the “quite rightly” seems somewhat at odds with the philosophy currently prevailing at the Old Lady. The fact that the Bank of England could, two centuries later, feel so differently about the core issue at the very center of its own existence than the faith professed on its own walls is a revelation in itself. By comparison, we doubt that there will ever be a Pope in the Vatican who will state publicly that perhaps Jesus-Christ did not multiply bread, or that he was not born from the Virgin Mary. This illustrates how difficult it is to define the nature of money. For centuries, we have used money to measure value, to store wealth, and to exchange goods, but no-one can really say why money has any value at all; a paradox which has trumped the greatest minds in Western civilization.

Aristotle was the first to try and tackle the topic and expressed the view that money had to have a high cost of production in order to make it valuable, and to allow it to represent a lot of value in a small physical format. He also argued that everybody had to accept money as a means of payment, as a store of value or as a standard of value. This drew Aristotle, the first famous gold-bug of sorts, to the conclusion that only gold and silver could be accepted as money. But even a gold standard leaves us with the quandary of a farmer selling his wheat for something that is essentially useless? Aristotle also does not explain why it would make sense, and generate wealth, for people to spend resources and time to dig up holes in mountains, and then take the proceeds of their efforts to bury them in another hole somewhere else? Even more alarmingly, it seems that the core of the Aristotelian argument is that gold/silver have value because they take a lot of effort to extract; in other words, at another time, Aristotle might have been a paid-up subscriber to the Marxist labor theory of value, a theory that we now know to be an intellectual dead-end.

Indeed, as the Austrian school amply demonstrated, the labor theory of value (the idea that the price of things should be determined by the amount of effort that was put into producing them) is not worth the amount of time that the classical economists and later Marx spent on the topic. Incidentally, this makes it ironic that so many people who claim to be Austrian economists also happen to be gold bugs. Indeed, one can be a disciple of Aristotle, Ricardo or Marx and be a gold bug; but one cannot claim to be a follower of Ludwig von Mises and argue that gold is the answer. Indeed, the founding stone of Austrian economics is that value is totally subjective. So how can we have a world in which all values are subjective—except one, gold, which would be objective?

The Aristotelian explanation thus falls short. The reality is that gold and silver do not have a value because of the time, resources and cost involved in producing them. Instead, gold and silver have value because everybody believes they do.  This is not at all the same thing and leads us to the second view, namely that of Plato.

For Plato, money is just a social convention and has no intrinsic value except the one that people ascribe to it. This is a lot more acceptable, and very close to the marginal theory of value. Thus, for Plato, money is little more than a social convention and money itself need not have value, except the one that people wish it to have; which only brings us back to the debate between Fox and Pitt immortalized on the walls of the Bank of England and quoted above.

Conspiracy Theories

A 911 Truth video recently popped up on Facebook (as these things are wont to do):

Old dead link: http: // topinfopost.com/2013/07/03/911-explosive-evidence-experts-speak-out

We live in strange times.  "Conspiracy Theories" abound.  Some turn out to be true (I'm looking at you NSA).

I'm fascinated by the 911 "Truther" stories.  The story told at a site like http://www.911truth.org/ is far more interesting than the official story.  It's also sickening to think our government would have blown up the twin towers so most people will never even look at it.

I like to refer to Conspiracy Theories as Conspiracy Hypotheses.  A hypothesis is the beginning of a theory; a hypothesis becomes theory with proof.

Personally I don't think our government blew up the twin towers.  What would be the purpose?  To get us to attack Iraq?  The government doesn't need excuses like that; it invades for perfectly ordinary trumped-up reasons.

One of the ideas I find most fascinating about the hypothesis of a controlled demolition of the twin towers is that a new kind of nano-tech thermite was used.  Some have speculated it was painted on the interior walls during regular maintenance and then somehow triggered wirelessly.

I love the boldness of that idea.  Since I wrote a novel about nano-tech I keep an eye out for nano-tech stories and the idea of nano-thermite is very compelling from a storytelling point of view.

If I were to write a sequel to Nano-Plasm it would focus on how this amazing nano-thermite could be used and, of course, as a techno-thriller, on how it could be abused.

This imaginary nano-thermite stuff has trigged all kinds of imaginative flights for me.  One idea I would tie in is that maybe there is a paint that is non-volatile until it comes into contact with aluminum - the outer skin of airplanes.  Maybe flight 93 spontaneously combusted and that's why there isn't much wreckage.  Likewise for the flight that crashed into the Pentagon.  Poof!  No evidence.  How about taking out huge numbers of electrical substations simply by painting this evil, remotely controllable, explodable paint on them.  How about painting nuclear power plant containment domes with it.  It's pretty easy to imagine lots of ways this evil paint could be used.

My story, which would be the main thread for a Nano-Thermite book, goes beyond what 911 truthers propose.  In my story a foreign government would have brought down the twin towers with a controlled implosion and that is what our government is covering up (you know, because we can't appear weak).

In my story, which has several layers, the airplanes would have been a cover for the controlled implosion.  The foreign government planned the plane attack so ordinary Americans would think the towers collapsed from the planes.

Secretly, this foreign power told our leaders what they had done, and emphasized they could bring down any building at any time, particularly our seats of power and of course football stadiums.  This message would have been communicated just after both towers fell (or maybe between towers 1 and 2).  And the icing on the cake of the threat would have been the collapse of WTC 7.  "See?", the foreign power would have said, "just in case you silly people believe the airplanes caused the collapse, we will tell you in advance that we are going to drop WTC 7," and then they went and did it.

Originally, when I was thinking up my story premise, I figured the reason to bring down WTC 7 would be if the twin towers operation had been run from the emergency center housed in WTC 7 (yes, there really was one).  Then it would make sense to implode WTC 7 to cover up the evidence.  That wasn't compelling enough to me.  It didn't really make sense to me that something as clever as imploding the twin towers would need a command center that was a whole floor in WTC 7.

Aside:  We had basically already won the war with Japan when we dropped nukes on two of their cities. One hypothesis is that we did it to impress Russia with our power.  Now imagine a foreign power doing the same thing:  telling us they can drop any building at any time and then proving it on TV.  ("And if you don't believe us,", they would say, "check out the video of WTC 7.")

My story is quite a bit scarier than "our government is the enemy".  Because even in that scenario we imagine we might someday find the rotten tomatoes and throw them out.  The idea that we were attacked by a foreign power and instantly brought to our knees is much scarier.

Which foreign power?  In my story I would make Putin the bad guy.  He's got the resources, the craziness, a country full of smart people who could invent this nano-paint, and he hasn't hesitated to poison his enemies (with plutonium, no less).  I'd wind in some kind of genesis of the whole thing going back to the cold war.

I'm not a crazy person - I can tell imagination from reality.  But this happened:

Back in the day I was playing the beta of Neil Young's (the game guy, not the singer) Majestic, which was an augmented reality game (ARG) that intermixed story with the real world via web sites and even phone calls to you, the player.  The story was about an evil corporation making micro-electro-mechanical-systems (mems).  The morning of 9/11 I received an email alert from the New York Times that one of the World Trade Center towers had collapsed.  And I assumed this email was from Neil's game.  It was only when the second email alert arrived that I looked more closely and saw it really was from the New York Times and that's when I finally turned on the TV and was shocked by what I saw. So it was hard to tell story from fact that morning.

When it comes to compelling narratives about what happened on 9/11/2001 I can't really tell which, if any, story is correct.  I don't believe any of them.  I'll give the 911 Truth people props for more compelling storytelling; and if you like science fiction at all, I recommend you visit http://www.911truth.org/ and explore it.  Think of it as an ARG.  And if you come away after that with lots of doubts, well, that's probably a good thing too.

And here is a video summary of the NIST study of WTC 7.

For me, though, all of the 9/11 stories, including the official one, are still in the hypothesis stage.  I don't expect us to get beyond that for another 50 years (or unless a Snowden comes along with PowerPoint slides [written in Russian!]).  To be clear, I think our government is full of misguided nincompoops, but I don't really think any of them are evil enough to pull off a twin tower implosion - if that's what happened.  

I don't know.  In the meantime, my imagination runs wild.

NSA Listening Posts - Crowdsourced

There has been lots of press recently about the NSA hacking into everything.

There are cameras in everything now; laptops; Chromebooks; netbooks; tablets; phones ...   I'm surprised the NEST learning thermostat doesn't have a camera (but it does have a motion detector).

Anyway ...  with consumers (that's you and me) buying this stuff and distributing it around our homes, the NSA's job is half done.  The other half is getting to information out.  For phones with GSM/LTE the phone itself will do the job.  For the rest of these devices, Wi-Fi is required.

Comcast is here to help!  All new routers from Comcast come with WiFi you can't turn off.  The idea, from Comcast's point of view, is that they are doing a sort of "crowd sourcing" of WiFi hotspots. Supposedly (I haven't tried it), you can connect to anyone's Comcast router with your Comcast account and use it as a free hotspot.

Comcast, as you probably know, has a back-channel IP address for every home router.  They use this for maintenance, and generally, the back channel addresses are IP6, which is cool.  But since we know the NSA co-opts consumer gear for their own purposes I think we can be pretty confident that the NSA can take control of one of these routers if they want.

... so ... to summarize ... as consumers, we've bought everything the NSA needs to bug our homes.  Talk about crowd sourcing ...

(Note:  It's possible to do small amounts of configuration to your Comcast WiFi connection - so I renamed mine from HOME_<some hex digits> to NSA_LISTENING_POST.  So if you're driving by and see that, you'll know where you stand.)

[Edit: My question for many years as been - how do you know you're connecting to a trustworthy Comcast hotspot and not some random router?]

 

Nine nines

 (Reposted from 9/9/1999 to approx 9:10 on 11/12/13)

Wednesday, September 9, 1999 - Nine Nines

Today is the famous day 9/9/99 (or as using the international standard, 1999/9/9, but that's another story).

Personally, I wouldn't have used four nines to delimit a list of dates in my own code - that's too wimpy! I would have used NINE NINES!

9:99:99 on 9/9/99 (that's nine nines) could easily be stored as a time and date. Of course, if you 'normalized' it, it would really be 10:40:39 on 9/9/99, because you would have to subtract sixty from the seconds and the minutes to normalize it (carrying the extra 'tens' place). (Don't laugh: I bet you can enter 1:99 into your Microwave oven and it will do the right thing and warm your coffee for 2:39.)

Today is the first somewhat official day of Y2K-ness, so I thought it would be appropriate for programmers all over the world to observe a moment of silence at 10:40:39 a.m. Or, for that matter, since we're talking about lame ways of encoding dates, you can do it at 10:40:39 p.m.! Or, do the normalization wrong, and observe a moment of silence at 9:39:39 a.m. or 9:39:39 p.m.! Whatever!

(In some parts of the world it's already 9/10/99 - oh well! Close enough!)

So, whatever you're doing today, at sometime during the day that might be represented by 9:99:99 on 9/9/99, stop what you're doing and think a deep thought. Think about all the Cobol programmers who have gone before, boldly representing dates as strings that may or may not be parsable in the 21st Century.

Then think about what we are going to do when the Unix date function rolls over in 2039. Then forget about it, because, heck, it's still forty years away!

Self-government in action

Is self-government possible? (Most people say no and think it would lead to chaos.) I would say a certain amount of chaos is good (but I digress).

Watch the following video about bicycling in Amsterdam (which I witnessed first hand a month ago).

 

Bicycle Anecdotes from Amsterdam from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.

Yes, some central planner laid out the streets, but the day-to-day movement of bicycles is both chaotic and somewhat beautiful ... I would argue such self-organization is suggestive of what self-government might be like: maybe a bit chaotic, but ultimately productive and energetic and efficient.

An Essay on Privacy by Robert Sutton, Brigantine, New Jersey, USA

(From:  https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-422.txt - about two thirds down.)

I figured I would share a bit of the philosophical basis I use to explain why privacy is necessary:  The 20th-century existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre asserted that privacy was necessary to make the most out of our lives.  This is apparent in his play "No Exit."  In this play, a group of people have their eyelids removed and are trapped in a room together.  It turns out this room is hell.  This is where the quote "Hell is other people" comes from, he says.  Their eyelids being removed is so that they can't even close their eyes and imagine that they are alone.

 

In Sartre's version of existentialism, he claims that humans have two modes of being:  being-for-itself and being-for-others.  Imagine you're alone in the woods or going for a stroll in the park with no one else around.  You look at all the trees, the park benches, and leaves on the ground, and just enjoy the nice scenery.  Since you're alone, you almost get the feeling that all these things are there just for you.  You perceive these things as objects in your universe.  This is being-for-itself.

 

Then suddenly, you notice someone else in the distance walking towards you, though they don't see you yet. Seeing someone else and realizing they are about to approach you, you now perceive yourself as an object in someone else's universe.  So what do you do?  You suddenly become conscious of your appearance.  You make sure your shirt is buttoned, you fix your hair, you straighten your posture so you look presentable and mentally prepare yourself for an interaction with another person.  Then, when the person finally approaches you, you put on a smile, claim you're happy to see the person, and extend your hand for a handshake.  In this mode of being, you are viewing yourself as an object in someone else's universe.  You're not just behaving as your true self, but you're also behaving how you believe the other person expects you to behave.  Viewing yourself as an object in someone else's universe is being-for-others.

 

Sartre believes that being-for-itself is the mode where humans can be the highest form of themselves and make the most out of their lives.  Being-for-others is the source of all shame, embarrassment, and guilt.  People who live through the expectations of others and always behave how they believe others want them to behave is what Sartre refers to as being in bad faith.  The philosophy is somewhat derived from Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of "bermensch," which is German for "Superman."  An bermensch is someone who is the highest form of themselves with minimal influence from society.  An bermensch is always living inside their own head, and they don't view themselves through the eyes of others.  An bermensch also doesn't follow any rules or social norms that they don't understand, and make the most of their existence before they croak.

 

Ever since the whole NSA surveillance fiasco, I realize I'm always considering how I appear to others.  Whenever I am talking with a friend, I have trouble getting the feeling of flow, in which I feel like I can be my true self, because I always know someone else is watching.  It's like I'm always viewing myself through the eyes of a third party.  Before every sentence I speak or write, I enter being-for-others in which I consider how I would appear to someone else listening in on the conversation.  It's like I'm always behaving how the government would expect me to behave as the perfect citizen.  I even find myself afraid to say inside jokes I have with my friends because I'm afraid someone listening in would take them out of context.  I find myself constantly restrained from being my true self.

 

When the whole PRISM thing got leaked, I could hear Sartre and Nietzsche rolling in their graves.  This news made me realize that existentialism is now more relevant than ever.  If we believe we are always being watched, we will lose our ability to maintain being-for-itself, and we'll all be living through being-for-others in which we spend our short lives as robots behaving through other people's expectations.  This is why in the opening chapter of "1984," Winston Smith sat in the corner of the room as he wrote in his journal, outside of the view of the cameras. He needed to escape the view of others in a desperate attempt to retain his humanity.

Feedly FTW!

tl;dr: Feedly wins. 

Since Google Reader was officially turned off I had to change the way I read my "morning paper" - my RSS feeds. The top two contenders as a replacement reader were Feedly and Digg Reader. Digg Reader came up late but looked terrific; Feedly seemed a bit too clever and cumbserome to me. But since I read my morning paper on an iPad I need to use Feedly and now Feedly's web interface looks terrific ... so ... Feedly won. 

One thing about the Google Reader shutdown is that Google said only about 500,000 people used it. (Only?) But Feedly reports several million new subscribers. Maybe Google used a very conservative version of "used it" or maybe the publicity was generally enough to get people to try Feedly. I dunno. It's confusing. 

Good job Feedly! 

[Edit: Still using it in 2020.]

Collaboration - Tim Cook

What qualities do you look for in terms of what you think will produce effective collaboration?And what's your role as CEO in fostering that kind of collaboration?

You look for people that are not political. People that are not bureaucrats. People that can privately celebrate the achievement, but not care if their name that is in the one in the lights. There are greater reasons to do things.

You look for wicked smart people. You look for people who appreciate different points of view. People who care enough that they have an idea at 11 at night and they want to call and talk to you about it. Because they're so excited about it, they want to push the idea further. And that they believe that somebody can help them push the idea another step instead of them doing everything themselves.

I've never met anyone in my life, maybe they exist, that could do something so incredible by themselves in companies with global footprints. In our world, in Apple's world, the reason Apple is special is we focus on hardware, software, and services. And the magic happens where those three come together.

And so, it's unlikely that somebody that's focused on one of those in and of itself can come up with magic and so you want people collaborating in such a way so you can produce these things that can't be produced otherwise. And you want people to believe in that.

 

Source:  http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-explains-his-strategy-for-running-apple-2013-6

Change is Scary and Should Not Happen

Such a Bright Boy

-a short story-

By Stephen Willson, 1981

Mrs. Phillips heard the front door slam.  She knew it must be her only son, Harrison, and he wasn’t in a good mood.  Something was always wrong with the boy whenever he slammed the door shut.  Mrs. Phillips knew he expected her to go to him right away, but lately she had been having doubts about how much she should dote over him.  He would soon be leaving home, not forever, but going off to graduate school, before returning to live with her.  She was quite proud of Harrison.  All on his own, Harrison had finished number one in his class his junior year and it looked like a repeat performance this year.  He had scored in the 99^th percentile of all college juniors on the Graduate Record Examination Special Test on Engineering.  Her neighbors commented on what a bright boy he was.

Mrs. Phillips had wanted to be an engineer; that was one reason she had married the late Dr. Phillips:  they both had a real interest in engineering problems.  He had founded the Phillips Oil Search and Discovery Company in Houston, Texas.  They had frequently talked over interesting engineering problems in the evening before retiring, and more than once, she felt, she had made a significant contribution to the advancement of the state of the art of oil discovery.  The board of directors had talked her into selling after Dr. Phillips’ passing, “so she wouldn’t have to worry about money matters.”  It was a decision she had regretted.  But while the late Dr. Phillips had been alive, they had shared the adventure of solving problems together.  She didn’t have that anymore.  All she had was Harrison.  But Harrison was fine boy.

Mrs. Phillips was more than little confused by Harrison’s behavior.  She had expected him to be quite happy today.  She let him stew a bit more and then went up to see him.  She knocked quietly on the door.

“Harrison, honey, are you alright?  May I come in, dear?”

She didn’t hear anything from inside so she opened the door anyway.  Harrison was so moody.

The room was dark.  Harrison was laid out flat on the bed, with his head sticking out over the edge of the mattress.  He was staring at some papers spread out on the ground below him.  One of the papers looked out of place; it was too colorful, but she couldn’t see enough of the paper to understand where it was from.  The light from the hall made a distinct shadow that fell from Mrs. Phillips onto the boy.  She hesitated a bit before moving the rest of the way into the bedroom.  She knew without looking what the boy was wearing:  he wore the same thing every day.  He was so stubborn when it came to clothing; well, when it came to anything; and he had resisted her attempts to make his appearance just a little bit more palatable. 

He was still wearing his blue tennis shoes with white socks and shoelaces that were too long.  It was a miracle he didn’t trip over them every day:  somehow he had adapted his way of walking.  His pants, as usual, were too short, so that when his socks slipped down even a little bit, there was a band of flesh visible between the bottom of his pants and the top of his socks.  His pants were always the same shade and weight of navy blue material, no matter what the weather.  His belt had his calculator attached.  His shirt was white with thin pale blue stripes evenly and vertically spaced around his torso.  The material was so flimsy as to be see-through.  Mrs. Phillips couldn’t see them but she knew there was an assortment of pens in his front shirt pocket.  She was very familiar with those pens.  Harrison was often putting a pen into his flimsy shirt pocket without the cap on the right end.  As a result, he was frequently seen walking around with big colored splotches on his chest.  If he put a red pen in wrong, then it looked like he had been shot in the heart and hadn’t noticed.  This had confused more than one student that passed him by.  Mrs. Phillips was in the process of sewing plastic liners into all of his pockets.

She went into the room and sat on the bed next to Harrison.  Her son was tall, over six feet, and very thin.  She could never get him to spend enough time eating!  He would never be famous if he starved to death first!

The light from the hallway was all that illuminated the room.

“Harrison, dear, what happened?”

Harrison twisted his neck to look at her.  She saw a tear was just then winning the battle to overflow and run down his face.  Another tear broke through and flowed down his other cheek.  He tried to open his mouth to talk, but only croaked.  He tried again, and this time the words began to rush out in little bursts.

“I had it Mother, but I lost it.  I had the Oppenheimer solution but not it’s gone.  It’s … gone.”

Mrs. Phillips made some ‘shushing’ sounds to calm the boy.  But Harrison kept going.

“I was on my way to school when I had, I don’t know, a sort of vision, you might say, right where you go around that corner near the weird building where the sun reflects into your eyes in the morning.  I suddenly knew it!  It was obvious!  I knew it was right.  There was no doubt.  It made perfect sense – it was so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.  It just … came to me.  I was on my way across the engineering plaza to write it down, really I was, I felt driven … when these kids… I guess, I don’t know, I don’t think they meant any harm, they just didn’t know how important it was for me to write it down!  But these, uh, kids, you know, students, they grabbed me and forced me into one of the Engineering Week contests.  Stupid stuff – why do they waste their time?  I wanted to get away and write down the formula, but they grabbed my red pen and made crude remarks about it.  I mean, it’s just a pen, but their tone was awful!  The next thing I knew they shoved a paper into my hands, laughing, and then they left, and I was alone in the plaza.  I took their piece of paper and my red pen and I tried to write down the formula before it was too late and I couldn’t remember the details that had seemed so clear before, but it was … too late.  The idea was gone like it had never really existed.  I tried for an hour to remember, but I couldn’t get a grasp on any good ideas.  My brain had blanked.  Harvey, you know Harvey, the one I talk to sometimes, he came by later and told me not to take it so hard, but he thought I was upset about the contest.  He didn’t know anything about the formula.”

Mrs. Phillips sniffed back a tear.  She picked up the brightly colored paper that was covered with Harrison’s scrawl.  The boy had been so close.  She read the printing on the brightly colored paper:

First Prize
Nerd Contest
Engineering Week

Written on a single blank line was Harrison’s name.

Mrs. Phillips gave Harrison’s neck a squeeze to relieve some of the tension and then she quietly left the room.  She was alternately filled with rage and sadness for the boy.  He had been so close.  Things were finally about to get moving again for her and then this … contest … interfered.  Why couldn’t the boy have simply remembered the formula?  Why did these kids meddle?  She doubted they felt any responsibility – probably had no idea what they had done.  Now she had to take more risks.  Damn!  The Oppenheimer formula was one of the more famous outstanding problems in fluids engineering.  If he figured it out he would become a famous engineer and he would bring other famous engineers home – to her house – for dinner and talking.  It would be such an exciting time to have all of that intellectual energy in her house!

Mrs. Phillips went down the stairs, trying desperately to control her emotions.  She walked stiffly into the kitchen.  She took a deep breath, and then suddenly her movements became quick and precise.  She reached into the back of the kitchen cabinet and removed a bottle of detergent.  She poured a tiny bit into a bigger jar and filled the jar to the brim with water.  Then she put the diluted mixture back into the cabinet and resumed her usual poise.  She wanted everything normal for dinner.

She cooked a steak and warmed some frozen vegetables in the microwave; she precision-fried some French-fries (Harrison loved greasy foods – they were the only thing that kept him from starving); and then she rang the dinner bell and Harrison, as he had been trained to do, came down to eat.  Harrison was still in “sulk mode,” and she knew there wouldn’t be much conversation tonight.  After dinner they listened to the Gas Company’s evening concert on the local classical radio station, and then Harrison wandered off to bed.

When the boy was safely asleep she retrieved the mixture from under the kitchen cabinet and crept outside into the moonlight.  She went to Harrison’s parked car and very carefully and subtly painted the Oppenheimer formula – inverted so it would look correct from the inside – onto the windshield of the car.  She didn’t trust that the formula would still be visible from the building – the one by the corner where the sun hit you in the eyes in the morning – where she had painted it the night before.  It was difficult painting precise mathematical shapes onto the windshield but she knew it didn’t have to be perfect.  It had to be just good enough for Harrison to get the right idea.  She took a quick look around to ensure no one had watched her.  It wouldn’t do to have some silly neighbor interfere by asking what she had been doing to the car.

Mrs. Phillips reflected for a moment on how unfair life had been for her, but then smiled slightly to herself as she realized there was at least one woman on this earth who could take care of herself.

And the boy … he would be famous.

He was such a bright boy.

GDC 2013 Talk on Guild Wars 2 Scalability (and link to 2017 talk)

I managed to give a GDC talk in 2013 called "Guild Wars 2: Scaling from one to millions" and it focused on two things:  (1) our general approach to development at ArenaNet, and (2) user stories of some interesting problems I had a chance to work on during the project.  Part (1) is important to understanding why part (2) is interesting.  I think it is only by understanding the scale of effort that goes into Guild Wars 2 that a person would have any appreciation for some of the server scaling issues we had to solve.

Guild Wars 2: Scaling from One to Millions  

My experience up on the stage at GDC was 20 years ago when I hosted a GDC panel.  I can't find any evidence of it, as it was pre-internet.  Wow, what a difference 20 years makes!  20 years ago there was almost no support; you showed up, found the room your talk was in, and hoped the PC would read your CD with your talk on it.  This year, the AV people were super professional, ensured everything was set up and would work, and GDC provided a speaker's lounge and rehearsal rooms.

I ran into Louis Castle, who I know from the Westwood/Virgin days.  He has been on the board of advisors for GDC and he told me it has been a process of steady improvement on the AV front.  "We are a technical conference - we can't have technical issues,", he said.  The AV people are all individually interviewed to ensure they meet the quality standards of the conference.

All-in-all, it was a terrific experience.  I had about 10 minutes of questions at the end, and then about 15 people came up to me to talk individually, which I'm told indicates some level of engagement by the audience.

Hopefully you can find some take-aways in my slides.

Update 2021: I gave another talk in 2017:  Guild Wars Microservices and 24/7 Uptime

The 2013 talk got an okay reception (and I wish I could find the audience feedback scores - I'm sure they mailed them to me).  The 2017 talk however got a great reception, with lots of feedback in the upper ratings.

Reader's Digest

When I was a kid, I was forced, FORCED, I tell you, to either go to the beach or go sailing every weekend.  Yeah, life was hard.

At the beach, I would read one or two stories out of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and also every story out of the magazine.  We must have had 100 of those Condensed Books volumes at home.  I mostly read thrillers; I think The Jackal (Abridged) was the most memorable story.  Oh, and The Terminal Man (Abridged).  That was a good one.

*Sigh*.  Now Reader's Digest has gone bankrupt.  But at LRC.com I read that Reader's Digest was a CIA front.  (If you believe LRC.com, everything is a CIA front.)  But, in one of life's great ironies (since Reader's Digest was supposedly edited at the sixth grade level) I have learned a new word from RD's demise:  sinecures.

But wait, a little Googling and we learn this is a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy:  that's the kind where a company files for "protection from creditors" and expects to leave bankruptcy a healthy company.  Which sounds great until you read that this is RD's second bankruptcy in 3 1/2 years.

I guess the CIA just doesn't pay the way it used to.