Tag: english

New pgp key

Posted by sam – August 12, 2009

In my foolish youth I generated a personal pgp key with no expiration date, uploaded it to a keyserver and promptly forgot about it. I’ve lost the key, which means I can’t prove I don’t want to use it anymore (“revoke” it). It will therefore live on forever on keyservers around the world. But I’ve generated a new key and hereby declare the old one abandoned.

Don’t let this happen to you, kids! Generate a revocation certificate ahead of time and store it somewhere safe but difficult to lose. Some say you should print it out on paper.

By the way, anything encrypted with the old key will be unreadable by anyone, so if you want to get something off your chest, here’s your chance.

keyID 87D944A6 is dead, long live keyID C713D021! If you want to communicate with me in privacy, look me up on any keyserver and choose the newer key. Or just encrypt with the following:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)

mQGiBEqC6qgRBACNgNVCzhv3hY+eIv+JqY25UJ4Ji9LBakwVBGaP7kbzkKFRVTKn
x8axV+dS4vRNFm35GcYKZ4+rq8PYohUWpyyCR5/7vamNpHcOnHsrQn+bh9n+agEh
J5ojvjBjK6xQtJXtMRaERVLsslBHVqAo23E14ORPqLEa+q/G6CN1b8QXGwCguAqX
Emi3pYkjCHns5uVk6ZAhU+ED/i2hu3DBiunGAPI6eiLox8XqZs1k1Tit3wR1a+Rv
A6eR/Fn2pOGhoqYrHgAs77TYd8i4DsrpxfylVbub4mRw5tqU3F3B2pDlzzOkCyJ2
LgjWBU45bpi2iGTP5OK92Ynu8bRgaVnZqIHWDsYLK17oThLY0xQ6zfK+V1IG17LV
HFCMA/95V60wmAA9za9zJUS63uWV4e+M8vL0P0IjA0srgZXytCaumTyL3ioSpc3Z
mC2jgbIhFAvYoctJkae/P7vw1YYSUqVtVasNEQ000VVwvoc0fI+PayaEeB06JU8X
afLsPFd91J/DKxGNdQPvAymoxpCo2gRPDNBj4ggacLt7YG0EI7QwU2FtIEhhcmR3
aWNrIChvZiBIZWxzaW5raSkgPHNhbS5oYXJkd2lja0Bpa2kuZmk+iGAEExECACAF
AkqC6qgCGwMGCwkIBwMCBBUCCAMEFgIDAQIeAQIXgAAKCRCwR9LwxxPQIeGfAJwP
uJpASRN2G7CRyAqLeaSuqmrX7wCglKAPhQAlkUNqy5azUhqW0QVZ8wm5Ag0ESoLq
qBAIANYV2ONUmRgyhhMfTfCwdpxhiE4mfW3sLNpVz/RN6uG+TqSLnNQpxd+NfmTx
rlKDsiBB5Aza1X8HkdXvAHx4ekMp3b+ZmnREgsvF+aFRGN+LPXOp5t64bYKhMDkd
2IQC9XjbqZhgV2xxElTKgdnwo7H3b5DCM/Cbjpq43ZtcAlbOhCE35EC6mJsmHio7
r/biBR0DryogAfcFIbZAFgtmMLnI+ndvH8kbFolyATK2Bsj9rJ/+FBqjYu/GJZJZ
TqXNv/JjDvUJx1h4ivKPsW9cBFUvJtPPR6iYPf1h+9JltOO2oyJMzAHDIXUDtqCM
nH7D+kVHCEVhtTKnxXi7vSb2HMMAAwYH/jYa7zEGb2VE0aI12iRQW1/NWlKhnAGc
GS9qRHtK83uIitDEmcWTbPVdHenHWL2wrp78zjQuFl6AWkDzbk/VbDCfc6A29ndm
2z8fMt9X1hQk4h8aqhkxnsuCVAD2P4loa92q75x6mOhkhKQp76YW07TrSw8wPD52
ogRkZ3nxavkGXJQA4wNQZFS0xLEUmRvZSuIMh+xXJChFPpqDtiX0HVVv4lmcZHQq
QDPVvnXerKuNtU4rFPLoKEzpKUQdtRce9SXS/HrykLxBfA3Z9SFQx/NsS957gv5w
cHslhOtbscK6/6taj++p2f0MtK+4KLHVOJHI/ycDdGk+eQkbLwkNEWiISQQYEQIA
CQUCSoLqqAIbDAAKCRCwR9LwxxPQIQu2AJ9C0+CjB08l5E1Fm6lasKXtMNQdqwCg
ps4fdwJLuMUlgWPCjE7XVDd+28U=
=207I
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

What if the world were made of pudding?

Posted by sam – August 8, 2009

Story from North America. First it’s kind of silly, then it’s kind of catchy, then it’s just great.

For people who are annoyed by bad behaviour in cinemas.

SF reading list

Posted by sam – August 8, 2009

I’m getting together a list of important science fiction books I’m going to read in some sort of recommended reading order. Suggestions are very welcome. Entries with asterisks are ones I’ve already read. Numbers refer to position in the reading order. I’ll be updating this entry periodically.

A note about importance: I want to include only books that are both important and good. For example, I’d very much like to include John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes but it just isn’t important enough. Conversely, I may be taking out some books after I’ve read them and found out they’re no good.

A note about the definition of science fiction: I’m only including “obvious” sci-fi, meaning that some books which have become classics of general literature are excluded. Briefly, this means stuff like Fahreinheit 451, Slaughterhouse Five, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Nineteen Eighty-One and Brave New World.

Title Author Year
1 The Time Machine * H. G. Wells 1895
2 The Caves of Steel * Isaac Asimov 1954
3 The Naked Sun * Isaac Asimov 1957
4 The Robots of Dawn * Isaac Asimov 1983
5 Robots and Empire * Isaac Asimov 1985
6 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? * Philip K. Dick 1968
7 Stranger in a Strange Land * Robert A. Heinlein 1961
8 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress * Robert A. Heinlein 1966
9 Dune * Frank Herbert 1965
10 Solaris * Stanisław Lem 1961
11 2001: A Space Odyssey * Arthur C. Clarke 1968
12 The Gods Themselves * Isaac Asimov 1972
13 Ubik * Philip K. Dick 1969
14 Prelude to Foundation * Isaac Asimov 1988
15 Forward the Foundation * Isaac Asimov 1993
16 Foundation * Isaac Asimov 1951
17 Foundation and Empire * Isaac Asimov 1952
18 Second Foundation * Isaac Asimov 1953
19 The Mote In God’s Eye Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 1974
20 Foundation’s Edge * Isaac Asimov 1982
21 Foundation and Earth * Isaac Asimov 1986
22 Neuromancer William Gibson 1984
23 Ender’s Game * Orson Scott Card 1985
24 Hyperion Dan Simmons 1989

Second string:

The Kraken Wakes * John Wyndham 1953 A compact, relatively minor but quite fascinating story
The Complete Robot * Isaac Asimov 1940-1976 Recommended as an introduction to Asimovian robots to those who want one, but the collection is rather uneven (especially the first half). There are gems too.

Under consideration (books which may belong on the list but I want to read / learn more about before including)

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale Philip K. Dick 1990
The Persistence of Vision John Varley 1978
Red Mars Kim Stanley Robinson 1992
Green Mars Kim Stanley Robinson 1993
Blue Mars Kim Stanley Robinson 1996
The Fall of Hyperion Dan Simmons 1990
Endymion Dan Simmons 1996
The Rise of Endymion Dan Simmons 1997

Nummern, Zahlen, Handel, Leute

Posted by sam – August 8, 2009

I’ve gone several years now without buying practically any books or records (maybe a total of 10 in three years). At one point I felt I was accumulating too much stuff, so I stopped getting more and started selling/trashing/donating it. But now I’m starting on a sci-fi reading kick, and the library isn’t really good enough. So I bought some stuff.

How the ecstasy of buying, gaining and owning once again floods my mind! How the dread pain of parting with money grips it! Sweet possessions, horrible mortality.

I just bought three books off Amazon marketplace, where the independent booksellers get to try to undercut Amazon’s prices in exchange for a cut of the profits. It must be a slim cut indeed:

1 Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel £0.01
1 Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun £0.01
1 Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn £0.01
3 Postage & Packing £3.94
Total £11.85

This isn’t exactly how I thought reading books would work in 2009, but I guess it’s better than the way it was before (or…?)

I did buy some stuff from a regular bookstop as well: Asimov’s The Complete Robot and Emergency by Neil Strauss, a book about the dangers of the modern world and how to escape them. The latter is pretty disappointing, but it does give me some additional paranoia-fuelling ideas.

One of the things Strauss does in it is get a second citizenship (St. Kitts) as part of a “life backup plan”. This re-reminds me of something a friend reminded me of recently: that I should be able to get a UK passport if I wanted to. According to said person, getting the passport in Helsinki would cost me at least 154 euros. That’s a bit much for a bit of paranoid fun. Also, when the zombies attack it’s hard to see how the UK will be safer than Finland. But still, it’s tempting. Of course, for meaningful security I’d ultimately have to establish a base / financial presence of some sort there, which would take some doing.

I still dream of Canada and South Korea, but in paranoia terms Canada is pretty similar to Finland and South Korea is about as bad in a bad situation as anywhere.

find-file-other-frames

Posted by sam – August 6, 2009

This post is for emacs users.

Every day I start work by opening a bunch of files in emacs frames. Sometimes they’re all .java, sometimes .cc and .h. Sometimes they’re all the files in some directory. C-x 5 f this.cc, C-x 5 f that.cc, C-x 5 f the-other.cc etc. I could use wildcards, but then all the files would be loaded into the same frame. There must be a better way! The following remaps the bindings for find-file-other frame to a function called find-file-other-frames, which loads one file into the current frame and the rest (found by using wildcards) into new frames of their own. If you only want to find one file, it’s opened into a new frame as usual.

;; a find-file-other-frame that for multiple files opens a new frame for each
;; one except the first
(defun find-file-other-frames (filename &optional wildcards)
  "Edit file FILENAME, in another frame.
  Like `find-file-other-frame', but in the case of multiple files loads the
  first one into the current frame and creates new frames to each of
  the remaining ones."
  (interactive (find-file-read-args "Find file(s) in other frame(s): " nil))
  (let ((value (find-file-noselect filename nil nil wildcards)))
    (if (listp value)
      (progn
        (setq value (nreverse value))
        (cons (switch-to-buffer (car value))
          (mapcar 'switch-to-buffer-other-frame (cdr value))))
      (switch-to-buffer-other-frame value))))
 
(define-key ;; replace the keybindings
  (current-global-map) [remap find-file-other-frame] 'find-file-other-frames)

edit: a perhaps better way to do the last two lines:

(substitute-key-definition
  'find-file-other-frame 'find-file-other-frames (current-global-map))

Aspects of pizza value

Posted by sam – July 24, 2009

The paper today had a look into the cost of family-sized pizzas in Helsinki. The story found that family-sized pizzas are a rip because the cost per area was greater than in the normal ones. Whoa! Though I wonder why they didn’t weigh the pizzas.

It occurred to me that the reporter had made the assumption that pizzas grow proportionally, ie. that the crust is as much bigger in a big pizza as the radius. I don’t think this is true – the crust is closer to being constant in width. If this is so, the topping part of the pizza grows quadratically while the crust grows constantly, so some of the extra value of the big pizzas is being overlooked in the newspaper story: with r the radius of the pizza and c the width of the crust, the area of the crust is

pi*r2 – pi*(r-c)2 = pi*(r2 – r2 + 2*c*r – c2) = pi*2*c*r – pi*c2 = A*r + B

where A and B are constants. How significant is this oversight? Pretty significant:


Here the dark blue line is pizza surface area, magenta is topping surface area, and yellow is crust surface area (left scale, cm2). Turquoise is the ratio of topping to pizza (right scale, from 0 to 1). The x-axis represents diameter of pizza in cm. A crust width of 2 cm is presumed throughout. Over the pertinent range, 30 to 40 cm in diameter we go from 75% topping to 80% topping. The marginal topping ratio (the topping ratio of just this extra bit of pizza) of this growth is a whopping 89%! Too bad they don’t sell marginal pizza. Also, I actually rather like the crust.

Still, IS THIS WHAT THEY CALL JOURNALISM THESE DAYS HUFF BHURR

List day

Posted by sam – July 24, 2009

My current list of the most overrated things. They are in rough order of overratedness (which doesn’t mean either worth or ratedness).

  1. Elvis
  2. Aristotle
  3. The Stone Roses
  4. The Rolling Stones
  5. Kierkegaard
  6. Death in Venice (the movie)
  7. Hegel
  8. David Bowie
  9. The Sixties
  10. Ronald Reagan
  11. Peter Cook
  12. Cognac
  13. Beethoven

This week’s list of words I would support proper use of:

  • exponential
  • ballistic
  • correlated
  • random
  • logical

That is all.

edit: actually that’s not quite all. Overrated thing number zero is sex.

another edit: oh yeah, and overrated thing number something is Michael Jackson *ducks*

Already confessed, don’t need to confess again

Posted by sam – July 16, 2009

Some wonderful lunatic has done a bunch of the most amazing flash-based websites I’ve ever seen for US churches.

Evangel Cathedral – they’ve got everything. Seriously. When you get bored with the minutes-long flash intro and click through it, check out “ministries” from some smooth porn funk about Jesus. In fact look at pretty much anything, it’s amazing, each section has its own theme tune and voiceover.

Sexy Church of Christ – actually called VTC Ministries. You have to see it to disbelieve it.

Slavery-themed Church for robots from the future

Truth Transformation Ministries – no really, that’s the name. Can’t think of anything funnier to say about that.

Also, also, also.

edit: Are you ready to be catapulted to a new dimension of worship?

Skit

Posted by sam – July 16, 2009


DAVE: You wanted me?
CARLOS: Yes, it’s about this machine… it isn’t working.
DAVE: Yeah, it’s broken.
CARLOS: You knew it’s broken? Why did you give me a broken one?
DAVE: You said you wanted a broken coffee maker.
CARLOS: Yeah, but this one isn’t working.
DAVE: What do you mean? It’s not supposed to.
CARLOS: Why would I want a machine that doesn’t work?
DAVE: Well, I don’t know, but you said a broken coffee maker so I brought you one.
CARLOS: Yeah, and I have my broken coffee right here and this thing doesn’t work!
DAVE: Oh! I see. You wanted broken coffee, not a broken machine!
CARLOS: I wanted a BROKEN COFFEE MAKER. Is that so hard to understand?
DAVE: I’ll get right on it.

***

DAVE: Yes?
CARLOS: I just wanted you to know you’re fired. This doesn’t work either.
DAVE: What? No, I’m sure it does! I tested it myself right before I brought it here!
CARLOS: Well, look. The coffee’s just lying there.
DAVE: You mean that cup of broken coffee? You made it with the machine, right? What’s wrong?
CARLOS: No, I brought the coffee to work with me. The machine isn’t making it do anything.
DAVE: You want the machine to make it do something?
CARLOS: Well, it’s a broken coffee maker, right? Here’s the broken coffee, it isn’t being made into anything or to do anything.
DAVE: Maybe we need a broken cup…
CARLOS: Shut up! You idiot!
DAVE: Oh yeah? Make me shut up.
CARLOS: Ha ha, I don’t have a shut up maker. I mean, a Dave maker.

Retired dead

Posted by sam – July 6, 2009

People are sometimes incredulous when I tell them cricket is one of the more lethal sports (or was so before batsmen started wearing helmets). Some evidence of this: umpire dies in cricket accident. Got hit on the head by a ball – from a throw, not even a stroke! Cricket balls are dense, hard and perfect for punishing the fingers of awkward catchers. And fracturing skulls.

The sun also shines into the pile of twigs

Posted by sam – July 6, 2009

Some uncharacteristic chess heroism:


Black has just played Nf6-d7 thinking he has enough time to force an exchange of my bishop on e5. Think again!

16. Bxg7 Rfd8 (…Kxg7? 17. Nh5+ Kh8 18. Qh6 and mate on h7 or g7 next move) 17. Nh5 e5


18. Bxh7+ Kapow! I think this is the first time I’ve done this kind of double bishop sacrifice with justification. 18… Kxh7 19. Nf6+ Qxf6 (…Kxg7 20. Qg5+ and mate next move, or …Bxf6 or …Nxf6 20. Qh6+ and mate next move) 20. Bxf6 Bxf6


and white should be winning.


Hypotheses

Posted by sam – July 6, 2009

I recently rather surprised myself by realising how easy it is to come up with beliefs that are basically hunches but that I’m fairly confident about. To wit:

  • Interest in pro sports correlates with religiosity
  • Preferences in programming languages predict intelligence
  • Physical strength in males correlates with self-confidence
  • The previous correlation is stronger than the correlation between attractiveness and self-confidence in women

Actually, now that I start listing them they seem so obvious that they’re hardly worth mentioning. Maybe my true calling is making up correlations for social scientists to verify.

Noticing this stuff is also an insidious kind of self-suggestion. Lots of people seem to hate Java (the programming language) because they hope they’ll become more intelligent that way (I may be in this group). Same for despising pro sports. In those two cases there probably isn’t much causation, just correlation – but I am making an effort to become stronger on the hopes that the relationship between strength and confidence is partly causal. Not working yet, but at least I can now confidently deadlift my bodyweight.

Your thought for the day: is ejaculation ever really premature?

People like us

Posted by sam – July 6, 2009

How does everyone know who to root for in instances far-flung political unrest? We want Mir-Hossein Mousavi to be the president of Iran rather than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and figure that there must be some kind of cheating going on because our guy didn’t win. Far as I can tell, Mousavi is supported by young, English speaking people with mobile phones and Internet access and Ahmedinejad by illiterate peasants. Why isn’t Ahmedinejad the default romantic leader of the people like Castro or Mugabe before they went out of fashion? How is Mousavi a reformist considering that already served as prime minister during most of the eighties, including over a 1988 mass execution of political prisoners? I’m not being facile, I genuinely am not sure why this is so. Sure, Mousavi has made some noises about relying less on the “moral police” and being nice to everyone, but it’s unclear why anyone should believe either in his sincerity or his ability to bring about such changes.

Also: Honduras. Unless I’ve misunderstood something, the president tried to subvert the constitution of that country to stay in power beyond his term limits. The courts ruled this illegal and he was detained for “treason and abuse of authority, among other charges”. How does everyone know we’re supposed to support him in his quest to stay in power indefinitely like Chavez?

Non-explicit effects of risk redistribution

Posted by sam – June 13, 2009

National (“socialised”) pension systems take money from people who are working and give it to people who don’t work anymore because they’re old. It’s a simple idea but inevitably it creates many biases and inequalities. Currently the best-known one is that the average baby boomer will end up getting more out of the system than they put into it. They were many and paid the pensions of few. The average person born in the immediately following generations will put more in the system than they get out, because they are few and pay the pensions of many.

So the pension system transfers wealth to baby boomers from people born later than them. On the other hand, there are other systems that transfer wealth in the opposite direction. Improved baby and student benefits are a governmental example, inheritance and financially supporting one’s children is a direct one. Perhaps the most important system is the improvement of everything with time. In a sense a thousand dollars was worth a lot more 40 years ago because of inflation, but in another sense it’s worth way more now because now you can buy an Internet-connected machine with it. Or: there’s no way for baby boomers to buy themselves a youth with Internet.

Of course, the world is also getting worse in some senses. Example: there is less cheap energy in the future now than there used to be. It’s quite difficult do judge fairness between generations, especially before all the news is in. Will the ecosystem turn out to be greatly damaged? Will the unemployed, un-needed masses of the future ever find meaning in life? Who knows. Suffice to say that almost everyone alive now is lucky with the perspective of the past.

But generations are just one pension bias. Another major one is sex bias. The pension system transfers wealth from men to women because women live longer. In addition, men make more money and thus pay more into the system, magnifying the effect. This is probably second only to marriage in wealth-transfers between the sexes.

There is a similar but opposite effect in the realm of insurance. Men have more risks from approximately everything, so insurance companies have to pay out policies on them more frequently. Interestingly, this is one biological inequality which is rebalanced by mechanism (there is nothing similar for pensions): insurance companies are allowed, and indeed do, charge men more for life and car insurance. What about other risk groups? Do insurance companies give discounts to unrisky ethnic groups? No, because that would be illegal.

In general, the more information insurance companies are allowed to use, the worse insurance works. If we had perfect information about the future, the fair price for anyone’s insurance would be the exact amount needed to cover their claims, plus bureaucratic overhead. Genetic profiling is a major step in this direction, and sex discrimination is a coarse kind of genetic profiling. Discrimination by ethnic groups is also a form of genetic profiling, one before which we currently draw the line.

Analog-y

Posted by sam – June 13, 2009

Is an analogy of the form “real thing X is like hypothetical thing Y” good or bad if you can tell what X is just from Y? On one hand it feels like it doesn’t really add anything, but it’s surely a very accurate comparison.

This is roughly the equivalent [to] going to a job interview and the company saying, you have a great résumé, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we’re not going to hire you. We will, however, use your résumé as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But we’re going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn’t work out, we’ll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.

For some reason this topic really inspires people on the Internet.

Suppose I sent a letter to several hundred charitable organizations that said: “Hello, I have $10,000 to contribute to one worthwhile, charitable cause. I will donate this money this year. Here is my address and my phone number. Please call me or write me, and tell me why your charity deserves my money more than all the others.” Then suppose I ignored all the initial replies and only paid attention to the organizations that hit me up more than twice. Of these, I selected the few that were the most persistent, and I finally gave my money to the most aggressive, in-your-face charity. Soon I would discover that this charity spends 95% of its contributions on fund-raising. I would then call up one of the “nice” charities and tell them my sob story about how I gave my big contribution to the “jerk” charity.

Or maybe it’s just my reading habits.

Ps. “Baldrick, do you even know what an analogy is?” “Yeah… it’s like irony, only it’s made out of analog.”

Surprising prime fact

Posted by sam – June 13, 2009

I bought two books on my recent trip to New York: one about how large programming projects always fail (which I suggestively lent to my supervisor at work) and a collection of problems from mathematics olympiads in the Soviet Union. The latter included as commentary to one of the problems something a little surprising. First, the result:

Where n is a natural number greater than 1 and pn is the nth prime. In other words, the sum of the reciprocals of the primes is approximated by ln(ln(n)) (natural logarithm) absolutely well, so that the difference never exceeds a constant (which is at most 14).

(The original problem was to prove that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes becomes arbitrarily large).

The distribution of primes among the natural numbers has interested mathematicians pretty much as long as mathematics has existed. One important result along these lines is the prime number theorem which states that the number of primes below n is approximately n/ln(n) in the sense that the relative error approaches zero (or their ratio approaches 1) as n increases. The absolute error (the difference, which is what the surprising fact is about), however, is (I think) not even known to be bounded. This is not at all easy to prove, and in fact it was only in 1896 that some people using non-elementary methods succeeded (this after Gauss had taken a swing at it).

I once attended a course named after this theorem, and the general feeling I got from it was that the distribution of primes is highly intractable and it’s difficult to prove even quite general things about it. Why should it then be that we can say something so precise about the sum of the reciprocals? The fact that this result was new to me implies that there’s some obvious reason why something like this is easier and less important.