In reference to this entry, I feel that since there were those who cared enough to post extremely useful insights (and, I assume, those who did me the favor of keeping their insights to themselves) I'm somewhat bound by reponsibility to make an update on that count.

About a month ago, the relationship in question ended. By then, I'd prepared myself for any eventuality (including, and indefensibly, to dispense with feelings of culpability were she to do anything untoward) but the actual event was fairly sedate, and we parted ways semi-amiably. Not to say that there weren't tears, but we'd both been ready for it, and we may even be able to associate socially soon.

For my part, I feel like I'd forgotten I was living in a too-small box, and now that I can stretch my legs I feel so much taller. Coupled with the recent purchase (and subsequent exchange) of my very first ever car, it's as if I've graduated - or made that crucial transition from 4th to 6th level. I may consider getting a new cat, but I need to wait for things to settle enough that I can spend some serious time at home.

The future looks vague but bright. If anything, I think long term monogamy may be put off for quite a while. On the other hand, I've discovered opportunities to revisit and explore other relationship modes, which have already been staggeringly rich.

Mood: Glad (and deliberately ironic)

I want 5 year old English speaking children all over the world to learn the name of my profession alongside Doctor, Lawyer, Plumber, Fireman and Policeman. For that to happen, it needs to be easy to say and remember. Digital Systems Analyst is utterly useless. Sysadmin is incomplete. Geek and techhead miss the idea of a job.

In response to the "what should sysadmins, programmers, and network engineers should call themselves" I still like the idea of the word cogigrex (cahj ee grex) n. One who herds thought.) The roots are certainly bastardized, and any Latin speakers in the audience are encouraged to pipe up with corrections. Or even other suggestions for a good solid English word for Data Systems Professional that a kindergartener could learn.

(Once again, the topic isn't right, but Slashdot lacks a Pointless Pedantry topic. Probably with good reason.)

Is there any existing mathematical system, I ask myself and my friends, which includes the idea of the empty slate? Not the null set, or zero, but that to which every symbol is added, the place where the signified interacts.

By analogy, if I were writing a really good calculator, I'd probably write (or integrate) a parse tree with the various operators and constants and whatnot. There would be, one way or another, an entity to represent addition, which would be created and added into the tree whenever the symbol + was encountered. Once an expression was parsed, I'd have an internal representation that I could operate on. In OO, I'd most likely use some version of the Composition and Visitor patterns to be able to simplify or integrate or whatnot. And on some level, the objects exist in a memory space, and their signifiers exist on a command line. In many languages, I'd be able to refer to both the memory space (or even all memory) and to the terminal (or the abstration of a CLI.)

But in my undergraduate nickle tour of mathematics, I can't recall any case in which it was possible to refer to either the empty page, or to whatever metaphorical place in which the ideas of addition and the unit and equality could composite into something like "1+1 = 2."

Is there any point to being able to make such a reference?

Honestly, this should go in the "Slashdot Whining" Topic, but aparently that's not an option, so there you go.

Would it really be so much a risk to allow HTML entities? I mean, really, is there some server crashing, cookie munging XSS entity exploit? C'mon, really. I get frustrated that, say, my description can't be spelled correctly since I can't get an 'e' with an accent acute. Somewhere there's got to be a filter for &.*; or something like it. And it's more complicated than that, since "&.*;" appears but neither é nor é show up. So what's the deal? Is there some rationale for trimming out only well-formed (if invalid) entities?

Just to follow up on my last journal... I'd like to make a formal apology for getting suckered into this. My only excuse was that I was riding a crypto based app-design project at the time.

I am convincing myself that I'm stepping out of my abstracted Slashdot persona for purposes of experiment. I've watched and learned quite a bit from the requests for advice of others in their /. journals, but it isn't something I've done before. So, in the interests of science (and this is my first time...):

A week from now will be my two year aniversary with my current girlfriend. We've been living together since she moved cross country to be with me. But for more than a year now, there have been serious ongoing problems. It really comes down to a series of idiocyncrocies and shortcomings that build into a malestrom of negative reinforcement. Of course I think that my idiocyncrocies and shortcomings are completely balanced and reasonable, and that hers are the result of severe fucked-up-edness. Part of the real trouble is that she thinks the same thing: that I'm reasonable, and she's fucked up.

The core issue is one of communication. It's fundamental components are twofold: she's terrified of any rejection, and her natural instinct is to flee conflict. So, rather than ask for something and risk being turned down, she'll bottle the desire up, only to explode later, usually fleeing without explaination or starting pointless arguments. My inclination, then, is to examine my own behavior, to figure out what I've done wrong. The trouble is, often, I haven't done anything but unintentionally remind her of what she's been repressing, and so a stimulus that should mean "something's wrong" doesn't; or rather doesn't really. Result: I numb myself to her outbursts, and ultimately to her entire presence, making the likelyhood of my rejecting her in future increase...

Then, if I see a problem, and bring it up, she bolts. Or, rather, she used to, and is starting again. And when she bolts, it's for another state. There's packing involved. Since I made it clear that this behavior was unacceptable, her compromise is to lash out, to reduce a reasonable argument (i.e. a healthy part of an engaging relationship) to a shouting match. I bring things up less and less as a result.

Things had gotten quite bad. I was planning my weeks around not spending waking hours alone with her. So, Tuesday (delayed mostly by a possibly ill-informed desire to to drop a bomb on Valentine's), we had The Talk. Not that we hadn't had Talks before, but my firm intention was to end things, and I know that came across. So we talked.

And we've continued to talk. I'm just not sure if I really believe there's any use to it. I'm not sure if she's capable of being the person I want to be my one and only. I don't know how much longer I really am prepared to wait for something to change. We made the official check up next Thursday, which is only coincidentally our aniversary. But I don't know how there's going to anything like real change by then.

Lest there be a question: there is much love between us. Otherwise we'd never have lasted this long. If I didn't know that the current state of things was hurting her, it would be far more difficult than it is to even contemplate ending our relationship, because I know the idea hurts her.

So, there it is. Recorded for the public and posterity.

Comments regarding my last journal entry tipped me over the mental edge into something I thought was kind of novel. I was going to reply in thread, but the reponse got out of hand so:

Except the matter duplicator argument does bring up the essential difference between paying for food or furniture and paying for software or music. We have money - in fact we have economics - to solve the problem of scarcity: that not everyone can have as much of everything as they want. But that's not true for music or software. I can give it away without losing it. (<hippy>Like love...</hippy>) Digitally stored data is like that; I can make perfect copies, and at almost no cost.

Ultimately then, it is not like walking into a music store and stealing the CD. The CD represents an investment of resources that has a cost. The music had a cost to produce, but no further cost to make copies of. The CD is scarce but not the music.

But, because the producers of music and software participate in an economy of scarcity, and persumably depend on it for food and shelter, they're forced to present a non-scarce product as if it were scarce. Part of that process is manufacturing its scarcity - a process that may actually cost most than producing the music or software itself. Distant recollection suggests that "anti-piracy" efforts, which manufacture the scarcity of all music or all software (perhaps only of a single producer) certainly costs more than the production of a single unit of music or software.

Ultimately, though, I see three alternatives that we as a culture that includes producers of non-scarce goods have:

1. Tolerate this manufacture of scarcity. After all, musicians, actors and programmers gotta eat, even if producers and managers are gonna eat more.
2. Refuse to tolerate the manufacture of scarcity and collectively acknowledge that, in a situation where food and shelter are scarce, music, movies and software are sucker's games. This also means accepting that as industries these professions will disolve, leaving only talented amatures. Some might argue this is a good thing, but most would also want to see The Two Towers this Christmas.
3. Refuse to tolerate a manufacture of scarcity and devise some other method by which these industries might be maintained, and at their present levels. For instance, there was a long standing tradition of software contracts, where programmer service was for sale, not the software itself. On the other hand, this tradition predates the ubiquity of the personal computer; the service was still scarce. I for one can't think of a realistic alternative means of support.

In the present situation, we live with alternative one, while we long for number three. Honestly, as a society, we tolerate the fiction that music is scarce almost out of politeness. Perhaps the annoyance we feel is not that of the righteous against The Man. We aren't rebels or pirates for believing that "information wants to be free" or that we have rights to fair use, or even that maybe we should have the right to free distribute music. I think the annoyance we feel is more akin to that we might direct at the extremely rude cripple, or the underqualified minority candidate suing for employment discrimination. The data production industries are like that. They are abusing a societal politeness regarding their handicap, the politeness of pretending that their goods are like any other. A politeness codified as copyright law.

Due to a link in a sig, I was recently exposed to what I think is a weak, although superficially compelling argument regarding copyright, and patent laws. It's an EFF article, so it's, of course, a bit to the left of center.

Here goes my restatement:

Hypothesize that sometime in the near future, we invent a device that can duplicate entire objects. By so doing, we would effectively eliminate the basis of conventional economics: scarcity. Once anyone can get whatever they want as cheaply as breathing, there's no longer cause to establish economic systems to control the distribution of resources.

One might argue, though, that manufacturers of every stripe would fight to have such a technology quashed, or at least limited so that it wouldn't affect their industry. This observation stems by analogy to the efforts of the RI and MP double-A (which looks confusing, but it's how I like to say it) to limit devices that can duplicate their products perfectly.

This seems to be an extraordinarily weak argument against the behavior of the MPAA and RIAA, since we cannot eat music or live in movies. While the scarcity of "content" is largely artificial, removing music and movies from an economy based on the notion of scarcity removes, to a degree, the producers and distributers of those goods from being able to participate in that economy. While food and shelter are still scarce (in the economic sense of the term), it seems unfair to admit that a thing has value, but remove it from an economics of scarcity.

On the other hand, if food and shelter were not scarce, if they were as available as dirt or air or water, the basis of that economy is destroyed, and there's no reason to squabble over money. Why kill yourself for a buck when you don't need it?

It's this fundamental difference between a matter duplicator (or, as an example, the Matter Pipe in Diamond Age) and a CD burner that weakens this argument to the point that it's effectively worthless. I begin to think it shouldn't have been included in an EFF article at all, since by extension, it weakens their position.

I don't want to set up straw man just to knock him down. My views on property rights in general, and IP in particular are in constant flux; I'm certainly not standing with the copyright cartels. What I'd like to be able to see is a clear path from a matter duplicator to a CDRW, or a crucial similarity between food and music. Essentially, a flaw in my reasoning here, because except for that glaring flaw, it's a very compelling argument.

Fair reference: the article is here. And the sig was grumpygrodyguy's.

I've been think about a synthesis of a couple of ideas which I think is valid, and it's implications.

Idea No. 1: Complexity theory, and self-organizing systems. This is big, and fascinating and slippery. I feel like I don't know the half of the basic premise, but it matches up with a number of ideas that occured to me in vacuo, which is always a good way to get me to latch onto an idea. I'm applying this mainly as it suggests that the contention that there is Order implies that there is an Orderer is false, that Order can arise from very subtle effects in initial conditions (or even just previous conditions.)

Idea No. 2 is that of N degrees of seperation. That everyone in the world can be connected to everyone else by means of some number of association. It's kind of goofy, but what I'm really trying to get at is that every fact of our society is the result of the interrelation of 6 billion people, and that patterns in that interrelation result in every observable charcteristic of anything one might call society.

Really, I don't think #2 works without #1, although I think it's observable on it's own. Every editorial tries to find the reasons behind this or that trend. How often does political conversation turn to cause and effect? And aren't the causes almost always in terms of structures of people? Very rarely do other causes make their way into such discussions. We argue that the rise is sexuality in popular media has to do with, say, the women's liberation movement or pressure from advertisers, rather than spectra of light, new broadcasting technologies, hormonal levels in the atmosphere.

But self-organization explains why we trends and cycles in social situations. Picture the human relation graph as a having a state - a very complicated state, but a single state none the less. I'm not entirely sure what contributes to the state, but I tend to think we all observe parts of it. What else do we mean by "the state of the World?" I do think that human wills influence it, though.

Now, the synthesis completed: Credo that this state is complex, and self-orgnazing (or else it would have either devolved into a simple trend, or collapsed - I tend to think that the threat of nuclear war is one form of collapse that could occur), and so very sensitive to it's previous states. Therefore a single human will, properly informed and acting correctly, could influence the whole state in a significant way. The problem, then, is to determine what actions will lead to what results. I suspect that while the simple answers of political activism, etc. do have an effect, they may not be the most effective. I also suspect that a perfect calculation may be outside of the scope of the human mind (at least mine) and that of modern hardware, but that some set of rules might be deduced. What those rules might be, or the result of their discovery would be, I can't speculate yet.

Two things that terrify and fascinate me that relate to ToC:

1. Goedel Incompleteness. Basically, Goedel demonstrated that any logical structure either cannot discuss it's own consistancy or it can demonstrate it's own inconsistancy. This upsets me because of all that I've invested in the virtues of logic and reason. At least arthmetic is consistent.
2. Chaitin's Construction. Often called Chaitin's Constant and designated by a capital omega, this is one scary number. It's the probability that a given Turing Machine will halt for any given string. But we already decided that the Halting Problem was undecidable, right? Well, omega is uncomputable. And random, even though it's constructed in terms of a polynomial. The best you can get is that the first N digits are ones (if you express it in binary). The N+1st digit might be zero. Or not. It disturbs me greatly that you can't prove that for any given Turing machine, you can't prove that omega is not an endless string of ones - which would be unity. With the Halting Problem, at least you had the solace that some string would cause the machine to halt.

(and it really bugs me that Slashdot eats the O-umlaut element in "Goedel")