goatee

time keeps on slipping

°2003.07.30.we | Linux on the Dimension 2400

In the Dimension's BIOS, set the Onboard Video Buffer to 8M. Boot from the amazing KNOPPIX live-CD — capable of running an entire OS off of a single CD — with knoppix noapic nosmp, then once booted type sudo knx-hdinstall, after it's done copying, prepend the boot options above to your lilo.conf, turn on DMA on all drives and you're done! This machine uses the new i845GL board, but I seem to have DRI graphics, the bcm4400 network card, and i810 sound working. (Update the bios to atleast A04 to fix possible IRQ conflicts with the network card.) Unfortunately, the APM doesn't work, and sometimes the machine freezes during a USB hotsync. I tried compiling a 2.4.22-rc2 kernel with gcc3.2 and the math emu disabled (bzcat ../patch-2.4.22-rc2.bz2 | patch -p1), but that didn't help.

Other notes:

uninstall and reinstall apmd
if you ever need the knoppix debs, they're here.
For printing to work with an Epson Photo stylus, don't bother with foomatic drivers, use the Gimp ones instead.

°2003.07.28.mo | Rape Reduction Act

Jokes about rape are not funny anymore, and now we have a chance to learn the extent of the problem and to better prevent it with the proposed Prison Rape Reduction Act of 2003 (H.R. 1707).

... The Act establishes three programs in the Department of Justice: one dedicated to collecting national prison rape statistics and data and conducting research; one dedicated to the dissemination of information and procedures for combating prison rape; and a grant program to assist in funding state programs....

There's a lot of good reasons to support this bill, I've contacted my representatives (you can find your House representative by typing in your zip-code) and thanked Senator Kennedy for introducing the Senate version.

°2003.07.28.mo | A Novel Spam

Now this is a different spam, and it might be a prank as I find it hard to believe anyone would be willing to take gold or platinum to a specified GPS location:

I'm a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Upon arriving here my dimensional warp generator stopped working. I trusted a company here by the name of LLC Lasers to repair my Generation 3 52 4350A watch unit, and they fled on me. I am going to need a new DWG unit, preferably the rechargeable AMD wrist watch model with the GRC79 induction motor, four I80200 warp stabilizers, 512GB of SRAM and the menu driven GUI with front panel XID display ...

I'm glad to see AMD is still in business in the future, but 512GB for a wrist watch? Sounds like software bloat to me!

°2003.07.25.fr | Lake George

I'm back from holiday with Nora, my brother, and large portion of my extended family:

After being at Lake George, Boston seems too busy.
Camping is pretty fun.
There was too much rain, though I enjoyed myself still.
I avoided bug bites until the last day, and now the red bumps are a delicious agony of itchiness, particularly when rubbed by my sandal straps.
There's definitely a wrong way to hike to the top of Mt. Prospect, I'm not sure yet about the right way.
It's cold at Howe Caverns, take a jacket!
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is as good as I had hoped.

°2003.07.17.th | Howard Healed

Everyone is discussing Larry Lessig letting the Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean "guest blog" in his place. Perhaps there are grand implications for democracy and all that, but I sometimes linger on the trivial. The image of Larry massaging his temple while staring at the monitor with migraine inducing intensity always gave me a little chuckle. But now they've given Howard Dean a 3rd degree sun burn on top of that! I've provided a version in this entry that looks a little less painful.

°2003.07.17.th | NYU, Here I Come?

I received an empty email with a MS Word attachment from my new PhD program today, I came very close to dismissing it as spam. I know that during this transition, I'm certainly going to have to go through a bit of a culture shock from my happy geek-clueful life here at W3C/MIT. Also, something I learned in obtaining my Masters degree seven years ago was that it's easy to get lost in the halls. I can not be as certain or confident of my position as if I was joining a company. In any other context, I'd have a fairly good sense of my immediate colleagues, my responsibilities, and the milestones for the next year.

A university is a rich and complex environment; this requires a diligent focus in order to build the right relationships and set the right course. In graduate school something as arbitrary as your non-tenured adviser moving on, or the company you were studying unexpectedly folding, can set you back years. Years! The opportunity costs, not to mention the stress, can be tremendous.

But, obviously, I'm up for the gamble. If things work out, I can see this being a path in my life that I would greatly enjoy. If not, I'll know I can move on and pursue that other, settling down, impulse that also calls to me.

°2003.07.15.tu | Shooting Bambi

On a mailing list my friends are discussing the latest Las Vegas sport: men shooting naked women, "bambis", with paint guns. Is this bizarre "game" consensual?

I believe there's two issues involved: exploitation and representation. Exploitation is the inability to exercise a right despite the fact that one has it in principle. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps." Do circumstances make it such that these women have no other choice? Probably not. But part of the concept of "consent" is that an individual is capable of rationally judging her own interests. Would people be even more outraged if Mensa members were paying to shoot at the developmentally retarded? Probably. Is it possible to find attractive women with very poor judgment in Las Vegas? Most certainly!

We trust an individual to assess her own interest except in circumstances where the person clearly can not, such as children and those with developmental impairments. Otherwise rational adults are presumed to be able to act in their own interests, but fail to do so all the time: this is freedom. However, this context of male customers paying to shoot at naked women exceeds the domain of the individual: it's part of a larger misogynistic context. Even if these women are capable of making a choice for themselves — and for a certain price, I'd even consider avoiding paint balls in the nude — they are also making a choice in the way that women are represented and related to by men and society.

As children my brothers and I would sometimes play the game "hit the monkey". One of us would stand at the end of a hallway with a staircase on the left, and restroom on the right. And the others would take turns throwing a little bouncy ball that ricocheted madly around while the monkey jumped to one of the escapes and our dog scrambled to chase and retrieve it. It was great fun, and we all took our turn. But in the case of these naked women, there is no such equity nor fair play. Even if each woman as an individual is acting in her own best interest, as a society we can ask if we want to encourage this view of relating to each other. We might use economics, the law, or moral suasion to implement our answer. I expect the economic mechanism would be impossible: subsidizing all women such that those even with extremely poor circumstances or judgment would find the offer unattractive. Legally, if we simply prohibit it, this raises the uncomfortable specter of the individual's sovereignty infringed by the state. Perhaps one could attempt to legally regulate this via the more accepted paternalism of safety: the women must wear protective head, chest, and groin gear. In any case, we should certainly heap scorn upon the folks that participate in this enterprise.

°2003.07.14.mo | Brooklyn Again

Some photos from another grueling apartment hunting trip. This time, I think we have a winner in a great loft in Carroll Gardens. And of course, when you take the Chinatown bus, there's always bound to be a story to tell afterwards.

Of course, more of this month's photos including other great stencils from New York — many spotted by Nora — are available in the July photo album.

°2003.07.10.th | Franklin and Twain

I'm glad to see Mark Twain and Ben Franklin in the popular media. The character of Twain has been in a couple of TV shows including Star Trek, and everyone knows of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer — Tom is even appearing in Hollywood's latest, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Ben Franklin's visage is no stranger to the boob tube where he's often seen flying a kite; a recent biography is much discussed and he even graced the cover of last week's Time magazine. If these gentlemen are being remembered and discussed, then I feel like my America has not been forgotten.

I love the both of them for their wide ranging interests, sharp intellects, and humor. In particular, they were both famous skeptics: debunkers of various schemes while perpetuating their own hoaxes for the benefit of reason and the funny bone. Mark Twain's experience in becoming a skeptic is told of in his auto-biography (excerpt). As an attention seeking youngster he found he could gain some small fame by being the most imaginative subject on the stage of a hypnotist, he only had to bear the commensurate pain:

Hicks was weak in another detail. When the professor made passes over him and said "his whole body is without sensation now -- come forward and test him, ladies and gentlemen," the ladies and gentlemen always complied eagerly, and stuck pins into Hicks, and if they went deep Hicks was sure to wince, then that poor professor would have to explain that Hicks "wasn't sufficiently under the influence." But I didn't wince; I only suffered, and shed tears on the inside. The miseries that a conceited boy will endure to keep up his "reputation"! And so will a conceited man; I know it in my own person, and have seen it in a hundred thousand others. That professor ought to have protected me, and I often hoped he would, when the tests were unusually severe, but he didn't. It may be that he was deceived as well as the others, though I did not believe it nor think it possible. Those were dear good people, but they must have carried simplicity and credulity to the limit. They would stick a pin in my arm and bear on it until they drove it a third of its length in, and then be lost in wonder that by a mere exercise of will-power the professor could turn my arm to iron and make it insensible to pain. Whereas it was not insensible at all; I was suffering agonies of pain.

When this young man matured into America's greatest wit, he debunked various frauds including a phrenologist who diagnosed him, without knowing who he was, with many flattering attributes, yet:

However, he found a cavity, in one place; a cavity where a bump would have been in anyone else's skull. That cavity, he said was all alone, all by itself, occupying a solitude, and had no opposing bump, however slight in elevation, to modify and ameliorate its perfect completeness and isolation. He startled me by saying that that cavity represented the total absence of the sense of humor!

Twain's anonymity was akin a single-blind experiment, the phrenologist (experimenter) had no foreknowledge of the subject. A century before, Ben Franklin had participated in similar experiments but instead of lumpy heads, the popular phenomena was magnetism:

In the late 1700's, Franz Mesmer, a Viennese psychiatrist, began experimenting with magnets for curing various ills. He later came to "realize" that it wasn't the magnet so much that was doing the work, but rather a mysterious substance that he called "animal magnetism". This "fluid" can be emitted from the eyes and fingertips of certain individuals and can be used as a vital force to heal the sick.

At the time, his ideas caused a great deal of controversy, so in 1784 King Louis XVI appointed a special commission from the Paris Medical Society and Academy to investigate Mesmer's claims. Serving on the commission was our good friend Ben Franklin, Lavoisier (the discoverer of oxygen), Bailly (an astronomer) and Dr. Jussieu ( a noted botanist).

The demonstrations of animal magnetism were held in Franklin's house and were conducted by Dr. Charles Deslon, a Mesmer disciple. However, the results indicated that when the patient, who was supposed to feel the effects of animal magnetism, was blindfolded, they could no longer even tell whether the mesmerizer was present or not. (Sounds a lot like Emily Rosa's debunking of therapeutic touch, published in JAMA, doesn't it?) The conclusion was NOT that Mesmer had failed to cure his patients, but rather that it was the influence and suggestion of the practitioner of mesmerism as well as the faith of the patient, that was responsible. Thus Ben Franklin became one of the first discoverers of the placebo effect.

These men crafted words from conscience, reason, and humor so as to become great levers of enlightenment. May the rest in peace and forever be remembered.

°2003.07.07.mo | Empire, or Not?

Even if our attack on Iraq was morally justified and, in sum, a positive act, the inability of the US to admit that it is acting the part of an empire will damage its veiled attempts to be one. The British Empire lasted nearly two centuries, but it had developed the institutions necessary for its administration. Ironically while we flounder in "post-war" Iraq, Time reports that the Army's Peacekeeping Institute is being closed so as to save money.

°2003.07.02.we | Design By Committee

One of the slights folks in my profession can pay to a technical specification is to hold one's metaphorical nose and allude to "design by committee." By this, it's meant that the design is not as elegant as it might be because of the process that led to its creation. By elegance, I mean simplicity and if there is complexity it is cleanly built up from an underlying set of simple axioms. Einstein once wrote "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

When a descriptive scientific theory is considered, one of the methods of analysis is Ockham's Razor: all things being equal, we should prefer a simpler theory. However, this principle also has a prescriptive character with respect to how we should build things. In Ockham's Razor Cuts Both Ways (Skeptic 10.1) Phil Mol° notes that Ockham didn't invent the principle. Aristotle wrote, "The more perfect a nature is, the fewer means it requires for its operation." Newton wrote, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances." Each is clearly using the principle in the description of natural phenomena. But one of Ockham's original formulations is prescriptive and very relevant to today's engineers, "it is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer."

Again, all things being equal, the simpler theory should be used. But of course, not all things are equal. Mol° enumerates properties of a theory that may not be equal, such as testability, fruitfulness, scope, and conservatism. Likewise, sometimes what we design is intrinsically difficult. So when someone disparagingly alludes to "design by committee" they are alleging that such a design is always more complex than need be. Is this always the case? Not necessarily. Obviously, design by a single person who doesn't know what they are doing isn't a good thing. And it's always better to understand something than to simply dismiss it.

Perhaps one of the most insulting theories on group design is an observation I sometimes mutter in frustration, "the intelligence of a group is equal to the smartest member's intelligence divided by the size of the group." However, this isn't at all fair. I wouldn't be a member of open format and source communities if I thought collaboration was useless. In Non-Zero, Robert Wright provides ample evidence that much value results from the iterative playing of win-win games between members of a community. But two other scholars provide an understanding of why design by committee can lead to cruft.

In the classic The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks noted that adding more man-power to a lagging project is not always a good thing. A critical factor in the success of engineering is its design cohesion: that there's a consistent tone to the results of decisions made over the various components of a design. As you add more people, you non-linearly increase the costs of communication within the community: training new folks, following the work of peers, and arguing about design decisions.

In The Innovators Dilemma, Clayton Christensen provides an Organizational Capabilities Framework that includes consideration of resources, processes, and values. He writes that, "Processes are defined or evolve de facto to address specific tasks. This means that when managers use a process to execute the tasks for which it was designed, it is likely to perform efficiently. But when the same, seemingly efficient process is employed to tackle a very different task, it is likely to seem slow, bureaucratic, and inefficient." As I've noted in the past, "Some processes are sufficiently flexible to permit failure or expedient success; others are strict so as to ensure better coordination, accountability, and protection for one's rear." Whether a process is one or the other mostly relates to how old it is. In particular, standards organizations accrue processes to avoid encountered mistakes and conflicts, without an immediate understanding of how the new additions also mitigate expedient success.

One of the ways in which we try to avoid falling into these traps is to only standardize that which has already been designed and deployed. However, this can be extremely problematic if more than one constituency shows up with their own design. Clearly, the rough feature set is implementable, but what of the incongruities between their requirements, and the (now vested) choices made to satisfy those requirements? Even given multiple designs that are somewhat mature, it can then take years for a community to develop a common vocabulary for discussion, and then to come to consensus upon mutual requirements and their resolution. Plus, the the last 20% is always the hardest. So it can be frustrating when you see it take a large community three years to finish something already "mostly done" by a few folks. But it's also understandable.

Furthermore, design by committee can work well if done well. James Clark has proposed NRL as part of discussions in an ISO committee — you don't get any more big and bureaucratic than ISO. He's not pontificating, he's proposed, implemented, and explained in whole. Substantive proposals have long been a part of the communities that I facilitate: put-up or shut-up. In the XML Encryption WG, the degree to which this principle was part of our culture was extremely gratifying. Developers made a number of proposals, most of which were implemented; some were adopted and some where not based simply on whether other folks also implemented them.

Consequently, the real challenges implied by an allegation of "design by committee" are

The size of the community, the bigger it is, the harder it is.
The character of the domain, is it political and/or religious?
The leadership, which is hopefully meritocratic.
The work style of the participants and culture of collaboration
And least importantly, the complexity of the technical issue itself.

Yes, you understand me correctly, I'm more worried about the size and character of the community than the actual technical issue. What then, does this imply for "design by committee"? Communities in the standards context can not limit their membership because of fairness, competition, and legitimacy constraints. Consequently, the critical factors are the tools (e.g., social software) and processes which permit the right decisions to bubble up out of the froth in a cohesive way. One of the proposals a colleague of mine sometimes makes is "Red Team / Blue Team." If you have a big group, divide it up, give each team 6 months to design and implement their proposal. There's no need to have unnecessary divergences, but let them each do their own thing. In theory, even if your team lost, it's better to have a cohesive design after six months than a muddled one after twelve.

The main problem keeping this experiment from being tested is the question of who gets to decide who wins?!

[Update 03/08/13: My colleague David Booth proposed, "I wonder if that could be solved by breaking into three teams instead of two, and then giving each person two votes, one of which cannot be for their own team."]

°2003.07.02.we | Unbrand America

A new street advocacy campaign brought to you by Adbusters:

"Because my country has sold its soul to corporate power.
Because consumerism has become our national religion.
Because we've forgotten the meaning of freedom.
And because patriotism now means agreeing with the President.
I pledge to do my duty ... and take my country back." - unbrandamerica.org

And while I usually dislike idiot boards, this one actually has a rather nice collection of public and stencil art.

°2003.07.01.tu | Flags

In elementary school I was a "flag boy". I missed a bit of homeroom, and had to rush to the bus at the end of the day, but I learned to properly fold, raise, lower, and "retire" an American flag.

After elementary school I had to be content with placing our smaller flag and aluminum pole in its cradle on the front porch. It was still a satisfying ritual, book ends for the day: standing on the porch and watching the morning sky, or looking for the first star while the flag gently flapped behind me in the evening breeze.

In college, and even graduate school, the American flag hung on my wall. I remember inviting a girl that I was dating in, and when she saw the flag, she wrinkled her nose and asked, "why is that there?"

The flag is contentious because it is a symbol that can represent different things to different people. Some of those things I respect, some I don't. When a flag is burned, the flag is a symbol of an objectionable policy to the protester; ironically, at the same time and independent of the policy, its burning symbolizes the exercise of free speech, something very dear to me. But not at all such divergences in meaning are so easily synthesized. Much ardor is generated over confusion about the symbol-to-meaning mapping, and the underlying differences of policy.

At some point, during one of many moves I've made, my flag stayed in a box. I don't have a pole nor a porch, and otherwise it doesn't really fit in with the decor. And given current events, I forgot about my flag as a symbol of those things I cherished. On reflection, I'm sad that I've lost my symbol and wonder whether I could or should still fly it and insist on my meanings. Instead, the flags that appeared in fear on taxi cabs and foreign restaurants make me ashamed. "Proud to be an American" gives me the creeps, and the flags pinned on politicians' lapels offend.

But even while I feel conflicted about the Stars and Stripes, when I pass the ripped and filthy flags on the SUV's of the new "war patriots," I think they should still show some freakin respect. And fortunately, Larry's post about the American flag being raised in the Castro on the day of the Supreme Court decision gives me hope that there's still a stripe in the American flag that belongs to folks like me.

[June Archive]