Rumblings From the Speaker

Down the Rabbit Hole with Sketchbook and Camera

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 22:31:00 +0000

I started this post more than 2 years ago, and put it aside after I stalled out in the writing. Then a few weeks later I had back surgery with a couple of months of recovery during which I forgot all about this post. I've patched it up a bit, but it's far from finished. I'd like to get back to it some day, but I don't know when that might be, and in the meantime I'd like to see other people thinking about some of these issues. So here it is; make of it what you will.

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Every once in a while I discover an interesting question that I want to answer (or attempt to answer, at any rate; some of these questions have been hanging around for thousands of years, so it's unlikely that I'm going to figure out anything definitive about them), and in reading or otherwise researching the question I discover other interesting questions, and the subject ramifies into what would be a dissertation if I were in graduate school. Not too long ago this happened again. Reading a book that had been on my "to read" list for almost 15 years, I started thinking about some issues that I've been thinking about on and off for most of my professional career.

The book was "Abstracting Craft" by Malcolm McCollough (see the references after the fold for a link). It argues for a notion of digital craft (such as for computer-based architectural design, or product design) based on manual skill similar to the skills of a potter or a draftsperson. This notion tickles an old interest of mine in just what a tool is, and how we humans form such tight linkages with our tools that we seem to somehow include them directly into our thinking and acting. It also brought up some ideas for an SF story I've been thinking of writing.

Read on to follow me down the rabbit hole.

First some history on how I got involved in thinking about these subjects. I worked for most of the 1980s on computer graphics display and input systems for Intel and Tektronix. From 1983 to 1985 and 1986 to 1989 I worked as the project leader for design and implementation of 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional graphic input systems for computer workstations. I spent a lot of that time learning what Tektronix' customers were doing with the existing graphic products, and finding out what new things they wanted to be able to do. And I learned a lot about how computer graphics input and display have to work together to give a user the sense of having input and output connected together, so that manipulating an input device like a 3D trackball or tablet can move a complicated 3D shape without lagging or skipping or otherwise breaking the illusion that the user's hand is connected to the computer's output.

Thinking about how that all worked led to me ask myself how a user came to think of a tool as an extension of her hand. The concrete case I thought a lot about was how I drive a car. When I first start to drive a particular car I drive more slowly and carefully than I would with a car I am already familiar with, because I haven't yet internalized the size and handling characteristics of the new car. But once I'm familiar with it (and it only takes a few days of regular driving) I no longer have to think consciously about how wide the car is, or what its turning radius is. Those characteristics have become internalized in some way that allows the conditioned reflexes and unconscious habits I've already learned in driving past cars to make use of them. And that feels to me as if the car is an extension of my body; I ignore the fact that my foot presses on the brake to slow or stop the car and think of it instead as stopping as a direct result of my decision to stop.

Many of the mental tasks the human mind is so good at involve making models of physical objects: maps of the space around us created from visual input, models of the behavior of people we meet created from observations of them, and schemas of stereotypical situations in which we've found ourselves in the past. We use these models to predict future reactions to our own actions, and to plan those actions. So, I wondered, perhaps my mind builds models of the tools I use, and inserts those models into models of my own body, creating an extended model I use to predict how the combination of me plus a tool will behave when I use it. That would mean there's a model in my mind somewhere of how my car's brakes behave when I press the brake pedal, and it's connected to a model of my foot when I drive the car.

McCollough carries the idea of digital tool well beyond the simple case of a graphic input device creating a visual artifact, such as a drawing or an architectural design; whenever a system can modify an output fast enough for a user to get the feeling of continuity of effort that manual skill requires, he believes that real craft is possible. This jibes with my own belief that many kinds of tools that manipulate symbolic media, such as programming tools, also allow a form of craft. That expands the class of "tools" to include many kinds of virtual devices whose behavior can be modeled by a mind and composed with a user's internal model of herself.

References:

Down By Law: Unequal Enforcement and Unequal Laws

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:42:00 +0000

I think most people are familiar with the way unequal law enforcement can be used to control and oppress specific groups of people. In the US, people of color are controlled by the the use of Driving While Black and Breathing While Black; I suspect many people who are not affected by those techniques think they're jokes made up by black comedians, but I assure you they're not. Ask any black person (men especially), or anyone from another of the affected groups (brown men with turbans, brown women with hijabs, brown people with Meso-American features, etc.) and they might be persuaded to tell you about being stopped or hassled for their skin color or clothing.

And the use of unequal laws as tools of oppression has been reported, though it seems that not many members of the privileged classes believe or understand just how devastating they can be to a community. The best-known case is probably the US federal drug laws which provide for much greater penalities for the use of crack cocaine than powder cocaine; this difference results (intentionally, if John Erlichman, Nixon's Attorney General is to be believed) in much longer sentences for lower class people of color to whom crack is much more available than powder than for middle class whites who use powder more commonly. Of course it's never just that simple: unequal enforcement also results in more suspended sentences to middle-class white first-time offenders than lower class POC.

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Unequal enforcement and unequal laws make members of the groups they single out into second-class citizens. We're all aware of how these tools have been used to institutionalize racism (though there are many who refuse to accept that such racism is all around them today), and in the recent election campaigns it was made abundantly clear to anyone with eyes, ears, and a brain that the same tools have been used to make women second-class citizens (and that there is a strong movement to remove even more rights from them).

But there's a special case of unequally-written laws that's not well-known among the privileged classes (that's you and me, white readers), and it's results are more dire than anything else I've mentioned. I'm going to take as settled that the laws and the law enforcement in the area of rape, especially of the rape of women, whether by violence, drugs, or extortion, is one of the primary tools of the oppression of women. Argue it somewhere else if you must; I don't think there's any question about it. There are two groups of women, however, who are more likely to be raped, more vulnerable to rape, and have far less recourse in the law than most, because they are subject to special laws which remove the little protection that the civil laws of the US afford other women.

One of those groups is Native women, especially members of Native tribes who live on reservations, although they're not the only ones at great risk. Native women face the likelihood that between one in two and one in three of them will be violently sexually assualted at some time in their lives (and probably more will be raped by extortion or harassment; there aren't any good estimates of the frequency of that). In many cases the rapists are white, and know that they will not be punished because the law that governs the women does not have jurisdiction, and the law of the surrounding white communities will not cooperate in investigating or arresting white suspects. Only in the last few years has this been reported in the mainstream media, and only in the back pages and smaller blogs at that. But this issue is starting to become better known, and recently has been mentioned in the NY Times and Salon.com. One of the main reasons for recent interest in it is that the Republicans in the House of Representatives have blocked reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it would increase the coverage to include LGBT, Hispanic, and Native women.

The other group is women in the military. Since 1995 hundreds of incidents of rape, sexual assault, or rape by extortion have been reported in the military, and most have gone uninvestigated or unindicted. Again part of the problem is a different set of laws: the military is governed not by civilian law but by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). A great deal of the control and workings of the UCMJ are given to the commanding officer of the unit in which an offense is reported, and the culture of company and field grade officers in the military includes a strong feeling that "boys will be boys" and that one of the purposes of women in the military is to provide sexual service to the men. I can attest that that was the culture when I was in the Army many years ago, and what I've heard from soldiers who've been in service more recently indicates it hasn't changed for the better.

Others have marshalled the facts around these issues, and argued the morality of them, far better than I can. I just want to provide a nudge to people, to tell them that there is a great injustice being done, and to provide some links to more information. I hope that all of you are as outraged as I am at the use of unequal enforcement and unequal laws to perpetuate violence against these groups of women, and to keep them vulnerable to it.

Links to more information:

Indian Country Today Media Network: Law Enforcement Gaps Leave Native Women Vulnerable to Rape and Domestic Violence
The Guardian: Sexual violence is tearing Native American communities apart
Dailykos.com: Hey, House GOP—How many Native women will be raped today?
Jezebel.com: Rapes on Indian Reservations Reach Epidemic Proportions

The Guardian: Rape in the Military: exposing the shocking truth
Cnn.com: Why rapists in military get away with it
New York Daily News: Special Report: Rape in the armed forces
The Daily Beast: Service Members Sue Defense Secretary Over Alleged Military Rapes

Way to go Curiosity!

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 07:23:00 +0000

NASA'S Curiosity Rover touched down on Mars at 0531 UTC (1031 PM my local time) today, after completing the "7 minutes of terror" landing procedure which ended by hanging from a crane attached to a hovering rocket engine*. JPL has received and posted on the web pictures of the ground beneath the rover, as proof of life and landing. That's six large wheels for an SUV-sized machine.

* If you were wondering, you now know where the jet packs we were promised have gone.

Oh, Too Bad ... It's Illegal

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 06:04:00 +0000

In my last post I proposed a life insurance scheme with which to bedevil our plutocratic overlords and make a little money on the side. I got a few comments to the effect of, "Good idea, let me know if you implement it," so I did some research to see what it would take to set it up, and found out that it won't work. It turns out that about 10 years ago people started noticing that companies were insuring their employees without telling them or giving their heirs any part of the payout. And then other people started doing pretty much what I'd hoped to do: buy insurance on people they'd never met and had no direct interest in (and often inflated the earnings figures on the policy in order to get larger coverage).

So, several associations of insurers started lobbying campaigns to get the state governments, who have jurisdiction and regulatory power over the insurance business, to pass new laws to prevent what they felt was a kind of fraud. The result is that since then, most of the states (including the state where I live and most of the surrounding states) have outlawed what they call STranger Originated Life Insurance (STOLI). Interestingly, the corporate behavior is still legal in most states, what they've outlawed is insuring someone whom you have no "direct financial or familial interest" in. So if the insured is your employee or your relative, even if they don't know you, it's OK as long as you don't sell the policy to someone in order to make money for the sale. But if the insured is a batshit-insane billionaire set on destroying the economy and society of America, and not related to you, forget it.d

Oh, well, back to the drawing board. Maybe I'll come up with something else that will work.

A Message the 0.1% Might Not Like (but the rest of us would)

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 05:53:00 +0000

Are you angry about the increasing inequity of income and wealth in the Western world, and especially in the USA? Does it piss you off that our Galtian Financial Overlords have privatized the profits from crazy pyramid schemes with convoluted financial instruments and socialized the losses from their risky bets? Are you tired of playing heads-they-win/tails-we-lose?

I think I have a way to get back a little of the money they stole it from us, while also publicly making it clear what we think of them. And not only is it legal, but they've been using the same technique in their corporations for years, and never could understand why we objected to it. Well now they'll know, and so will you if you go below the cut.

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For years now, corporations have been taking out life insurance policies on their employees, with the corporation as beneficiaries. They've done this not just for the key executives like the CEO and COO, as you'd expect, but also for arbitrary middle and lower managers, and even ordinary workers. Often the insurance payout to the company far exceeds all retirement and other benefits to the family of the deceased, and neither the employee nor the family ever knew about them, and they can't benefit from them even if they did know. Aside from any arguments about fairness, that does seem a little ghoulish, doesn't it? And you have to wonder if the chance of gaining so much money from the death of an employee doesn't raise a conflict of interest with the company caring about the health and welfare of its workers. Not that they'd do anything to shorten an employee's lifespan, of course.

I propose to turn this around on the rich and powerful. We should establish an organization to purchase life insurance policies on members of the oligarchy that rules the USA, rich and powerful (and preferably old) people like the Koch brothers, John Boehner, Jamie Dimon, and so on. Shares of each policy would then be sold just as lottery tickets are sold now, for instance by taking out large ads in newspapers and on political blogs. Just for example, and not suggesting that these numbers should be used in an actual lottery, suppose that each policy is for US $10 million, and one thousand shares are sold for each, with each shareholder paying ¹/₁₀₀₀ of the premium. Part of the premiums will go to handle administrative costs, advertising, etc, and part could be invested to fund future operations; the rest would pay for premiums for the policy from an insurance company; once the lottery has taken out a number of policies it should be able to negotiate better prices with the insurance carriers based on volume of business. Then when the insured person dies, each shareholder gets US $10,000 (before taxes).

Consider the advantages. Some people get to pay some money and get back (possibly after some years) still more. The insured get a message from their beneficiaries about why they're valued (or rather why their deaths will be valued), and to some extent the system gets turned to the benefit of the 99% for a change.

I think this proposal could work, and I would really like to see it tried out, so at least one member of the American kleptocracy gets the message. If you have ideas on how to implement it, or want to help do it, post a comment here on my blog or on my streams on G+, Facebook, or Twitter.

Geometry As An Interactive Design Space

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:12:00 +0000

I've been somewhat coy about the software project I'm working on; that was exacerbated by my having to take a break from working on it for some months to deal with other aspects of Real Life ; now I want to talk about it in some detail, and show you why I'm interested in it, and what I hope will come out of it. If you haven't yet read my previous post on "The Geometry of the Many-Angled Ones", please follow that link and read it; there's a very basic description of Geometric Algebra there, and that's the basis of the software I'm designing. When you come back, jump past the cut for the rest if this post.

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I've loved the study of Geometry for a very long time, partly because its visual aspect appeals to my sense of visual aesthetics, partly because of the elegant way that modern geometry is built on top of symmetry groups, and partly because it's the basis for a lot of beautiful mathematical art. One fascinating way to study (oh, tell the truth, to play with) geometry is with a kind of software called a dynamic geometry environment. To the casual user, this looks like a drawing program with some specialized graphic objects and ways to create and measure lengths, areas, volumes, and angles. Some are 2D, with objects like points, line segments, rays, and lines, circles, and polygons and some are 3D, adding planes, spheres, and polyhedra. The key addition is the ability to constrain objects and groups of objects in various ways. For instance, creating a line segment whose endpoints are the centers of two circles, or a sphere whose center point always resides in a given plane.

The diagram below was created in a free dynamic geometry program called GeoGebra. I drew 2 circles and connected the centers with a line segment. Then I created a point where the line segment intersected each of the circles, and created a line tangent to the circle at each of the intersection points, and put an angle measurer on each of those intersections. Each of those operations was a single pick from a menu and then selecting or creating one or more points or lines. Here's the list of created objects:

No.	Name	Definition	Value
1	Point A		A = (-0.02, 2.62)
2	Point B		B = (-1.62, 3.7)
3	Circle c	Circle through B with center A	c: (x + 0.02)² + (y - 2.62)² = 3.73
4	Point C		C = (5.18, 0.6)
5	Point D		D = (3.4, 1.72)
6	Circle d	Circle through D with center C	d: (x - 5.18)² + (y - 0.6)² = 4.42
7	Segment a	Segment [A, C]	a = 5.58
8	Point E	Intersection point of c, a	E = (1.78, 1.92)
9	Point F	Intersection point of d, a	F = (3.22, 1.36)
10	Line b	Tangent to c through E	b: 1.8x - 0.7y = 1.86
11	Line e	Tangent to d through F	e: -1.96x + 0.76y = -5.27
12	Angle β	Angle between a, e	β = 90°
13	Angle α	Angle between b, a	α = 90°

And here is what the diagram looked like right after I created it:

Note that both the measured angles are 90°. Now here's another view of the diagram, in which I've changed the sizes of the circles and positions of their centers by dragging on the appropriate points.

All the elements of the diagram updated themselves as I dragged the points, so that the constraints I'd created were always obeyed.

The thing that got me interested in the design of dynamic geometry environments was reading several papers written by H. S. M. Coxeter, arguably the greatest geometer of the 20th Century, and certainly the greatest champion of the visual aspect of mathematics in the anti-visual era of Nicolas Bourbaki. One of Coxeter's diagrams struck me as rather beautiful, a 3D rendering of 5 mutually-tangent spheres:

Five Spheres in Mutual Contact H. S. M. Coxeter

Journal for Geometry and Graphics Vol. 4, No. 2

In this image, the 5 spheres have radii in the ratios 1, r, r², r³, and r⁴. For Coxeter's 90th birthday, the Australian artist John Robinson gave him a sculpture of that model, in which the four largest spheres are made of wood and the smallest (just visible behind the others in the middle of the image) is made of steel.

Coxeter did a lot of work on sequences of mutually tangent circles (and spheres, and hyperspheres of arbitrary dimension.) He showed that if you create an unbounded sequence of circles such that every subsequence of 4 circles is mutually tangent, the result is that the sequence is self-similar under a transformation consisting of a scaling and a rotation, and the radii of the circles form a Fibonacci series (and so the scaling is a geometric progression whose ratio approaches the Golden Ratio, τ + √τ where τ = ½(√5 + 1). See figure below.

Sequence of Mutually Tangent Circles H. S. M. Coxeter

"Loxodromic Sequences of Tangent Spheres." Aequationes Math. 1, 112-117, 1968.

That curve connecting the points of contact between the circles, as result of the Fibonacci series of radii, is a self-similar equiangular spiral. Similarly, for spheres of dimension n, you can create a unique self-similar sequence of spheres where subsequences of n+2 spheres are mutually tangent and the points of contact are connected by a self-similar spiral in n dimensions. In the case of n=3 (the ordinary sphere), the curve is a concho-spiral: a spiral drawn on a cone.

All this got me to thinking about how a model of the sphere case, with the spiral somehow drawn in it, would look. What I could visualize of it, based on playing with sketches and with diagrams drawn in a couple of dynamic geometry environments that I had easy access to, made me think that it could make a very beautiful model, if it were realized as transparent spheres with something like wire to show the spiral, and perhaps to decorate the spheres with curves that emphasize the contact points. There are some interesting problems in making a model like that rigid enough so its parts don't shake, and the more I thought about them, the more it seemed reasonable to build the model in pieces from a computer file with a 3D printer.

I started evaluating all the software that I might be able to use to create the computer version of the model, and found that there was nothing that quite did the job. None of the standard graphic programs I looked at could create the geometric constraints I needed, and while there are several engineering programs that might do the job with some kludging, they're all more expensive than I can afford for this project, considering that having the model printed commercially would cost several hundred dollars, and that getting it right might need several attempts. Looking at the math programs, especially geometry software, none of them except Mathematica could easily generate the right kind of files, and none of them were designed to easily do both 2D and 3D in the same diagram (so that I can decorate the spheres by plotting curves on their surfaces). Most of them don't do 3D at all, and of those that do, most of them work by switching between 2D and 3D modes.

At this point, I realized something about the implementation of all the geometry software I'd looked at. They all seemed to use standard coordinate geometry to describe the geometric primitives, so each primitive (point, line, curve, etc.) is described by some special data structure, and each constraint or other relation (e.g., testing for intersection of 2 primitives) is a special piece of code, and each kind of geometry (2D or 3D, Euclidean, Hyperbolic, or Spherical) requires different code for each of those relations. And I know of a better way, one I'd been reading about for the last couple of years: using Geometric Algebra.

I did some research on the web, and got a couple more books on the subject, and this is what I found out about the current state of Geometric Algebra (GA) and the software supporting it. There are open-source (gnu license) libraries for building GA software on any graphics hardware that uses OpenGL, the standard 3D graphics library used on Mac OS and iOS (iPhone and iPad); it's also available for Windows and Linux). There is a book describing the software and its use, Geometric Algebra For Computer Science, An Object Oriented Approach to Geometry, and the website at that link includes other software including a viewer for GA diagrams, and downloadable files of all the diagrams in the book. The library, as it turns out, includes a code generator that creates GA code that's almost as efficient as C code for the same purpose.

The book also describes techniques for using a 5 dimensional conformal (angle-preserving) GA space to represent a 3 dimensional geometry, whether it's Euclidean, Hyperbolic, or Spherical. In that representation all points, lines, planes, and circles are represented by the same basic type of object, and computing intersections, tangency, distance, and angles between objects all use the same kind of computation. 2D is automatically available in the same framework just by describing a surface (plane or spherical) in which the 2D objects are embedded. And all geometric transformations of these objects, translations, rotations, and reflections are represented by a single class of object, called a versor.

But wait, there's more. GA supports an extension, Geometric Calculus, for computing derivatives and integrals of versors. It turns out that, for instance, you can use it to compute incremental changes of a versor, giving a set of versors that can be used to create an animation of a geometric object.

As far as I can tell, none of the commercial geometric software uses GA, with the exception of an add-on package that someone has written for Mathematica. I think using GA to implement the geometric representation of a dynamic geometry environment would be a big win in terms of elegance of design, maintainability, and ease of comprehension and change of the code. So I started looking at what it would take to build such a program on my Macintosh. And I'll relate some of what I found in the next part of this post, GA II: Tales of the Outer Product.

If You Want War, Prepare For War.

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 22:09:00 +0000

I realize it's been a long time since I posted an entry in this blog. There are a lot of reasons for the silence, and most of obstacles have gone away now so I was planning to start posting again in the next couple of weeks. This morning, however, I read this article on wired.com and I have to comment on it.

The gist of the article is that the US Air Force is deploying aircraft in the region around Iran with the ability to rapidly destroy Iran's anti-aircraft capability in order to allow either bombing of nuclear facilities identified as possibly involved in the nuclear weapons project that Washington alleges Iran to be working on, or, less probably (I hope), an invasion of Iran by US and Israeli forces.

The first thought I had was of deja vu: shades of 2003 and the preparations for invading Iraq while the US government lied to the US people and the world about the non-existent Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons programs. Now that the US military involvement in Iraq has finally ended, and the conventional military involvement in Afghanistan is scheduled to begin winding down, the US military is in danger of not having any wars except the drone wars the CIA and the Defense Department's Joint Special Operations Command are waging in Yemen (where the drone war has just been escalated), Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Somalia. So it's not surprising that they're hoping to start another one in Iran.

After the cut I'll talk about why this is an extremely bad idea, and why the American people should demand that it not happen.

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I'm not going to go over all the arguments about why the Iranian nuclear program is not worth going to war over for the US, or why it wouldn't be worth it for Israel if the Israeli government was composed of people of good will who were really interested in a peaceful resolution of their differences with the Palestinian people and the neighboring Arab states. Let's just say that I'm persuaded by what I know of the region's history and current events, and by the fact that the US is willing to accept (in fact, was willing to help create) the nuclear weapons capabilities of India and Pakistan, which have been ready to go to war at least 3 times in the last 4 decades and are currently at least partially controlled by political factions with strong nationalist and jingoist attitudes. And there is some doubt among nuclear experts (not spies, who don't really have the technical expertise to judge, and who are more affected by the political forces that make war desirable for reasons other than the resolution of international conflicts) about whether in fact the Iranian government even intends to build a nuclear weapon. They may have decided they want to develop their nuclear capability to the point where they know how to build one, and can do so within some period of months after deciding they need one.

So what's likely to happen if the US military has its way, and those aircraft are used in an attack on Iran? If that attack is the prelude to a land invasion, it will be as big a mistake as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, or perhaps even bigger. (The following comparison is taken from a chart prepared by US News and World Report). Iran is almost 4 times the size of Iraq in land area, and its topography includes some very rugged mountains and high plateaus, compared to Iraq's mostly broad, flat plains, so movement of military forces is harder, and more easily opposed. The population of Iran is more than twice that of Iraq and is much less diverse; almost 90% of the population is Shi'a Moslem, with 9% Sunni Moslem, so that secular conflict and in particular setting one group against the other, is much less likely. All these differences mean that a land war in Iran is going to be a lot more problematic for the US than the Iraq invasion was.

In addition, the international support for an invasion of Iran will be considerably less than it was for the invasion of Iraq. Both Russia and China are heavily invested in Iranian oil and natural gas, and would not be likely to support a military action that would reduce or destroy Iran's industrial infrastructure. Both of those countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council, with veto power, so the UN is not going to be involved in military action in Iran, as it was in Iraq. The major military alliance in Afghanistan was NATO, on the basis that it was reacting to the 9/11 al Qaeda attack on the US, as required in the NATO charter. An attack on Iran unprovoked by military agression might be met with a very different reaction on the part of many of the NATO member countries. Britain may go along with the US, given its historical antagonism to Iran and its recent willingness to ape American policies, but France and Germany have been reluctant to agree to the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran at the US' request, and might very well balk at an invasion. With just the US and Israel as the major military powers, and given that US ground forces have not yet been re-equipped and brought up to strength and readiness after the 10 year meat grinder of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it's unlikely that a ground war would be successful. Air bombardment would seriously damage Iranian military and industrial infrastructure and create hardship for the civilian population, but it would not by itself be able to seize and hold any large fraction of the territory.

What about an air campaign with the limited objective of destroying Iran's nuclear weapon development capability? It would most likely be successful, with the result that it would probably have to destroy the entire nuclear industry in order to guarantee the weapons program could not restart in less than 5 to 10 years. Of course that would leave the US and Israel in a state of war with Iran, and Iran would retain most of its military resources except those specifically targeted to allow the bombers to destroy nuclear facilities.

In either case, Iran is very likely to respond by targeting the oil supply chain. In fact, they've already said that that is what they will do in the event of being attacked by the US or Israel. One possible retaliation is to use their medium range missles to sink an oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz. Properly timed, this could block the Straits, preventing further oil shipments through that region. More covert operations outside the immediate region could target tankers, refineries, and petroleum storage facilities, none of which are particularly well-protected. At the very least, the US and Europe would have to cope with the economic damage of very high oil prices, at the worst, oil supplies could be significantly curtailed for a long period of time, perhaps years.

My conclusion is that a military operation against Iran is not necessary fo a non-imperialist American foreign policy, or a military policy based on resolution of conflicts rather than on maintaining a constant state of warfare for political reasons. Further, such an operation is undesirable if only from the point of view of US interests, because of the tremendous cost to the American and other Western economies, and to the international reputation and good will that America has left after the previous debacles in the Middle East. Therefore, I will put up my name, my financial worth, and my effort to work against this war, and all who advocate and work for it. I've seen 4 American wars in my lifetime that were unnecessary and terribly destructive in lives and property and the opportunity to build a better world for all of us, on all sides of those conflicts. I fought in one of those wars, and I can attest from personal experience how bad an idea it was for all concerned. It's my hope that Americans will protest this attempt to create yet another such war, and stop the cycle of misery they cause.

Stop SOPA Before it Stops the Internet!

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:58:00 +0000

Steve Jobs: Say What you Want About Him, He's Left the World Changed.

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 05:08:00 +0000

Steve Jobs is gone now, but the engine of change he built is still there, and still changing the world.

I met Jobs and Wozniak once, in the mid-seventies when they demonstrated the Apple 1 at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford. Jobs seemed pretty intense to me, especially as I thought at the time that the Apple 1 was not powerful enough to be a useful computer and so was not worth the intensity. At that same meeting I had conversations with Victor French and Lee Felsenstein, and a long discussion about portable computers with Adam Osborne (and tried lifting an Osborne 1 prototype; at 25 pounds it was not by my definition a "portable computer"). At the time, Jobs and Wozniak faded into the background for me.

Over the next few years I worked with some of the technologies that went into the Lisa and the Macintosh¹, so when they were released I was a lot more sympathetic to their strategies. Since then I've owned 7 Macintosh desktops and laptops, as well as numerous iPods, and an iPhone, and I've very carefully watched how Jobs has used the advance of power and functionality to aid his main goal: producing computers which are intended to be used by people who are not technologists, as tools to get their work and play done. This goal is one of the reasons I became involved with personal computing in the 70s, and why I continued to work with computers of that class and the software that runs on them. It's been inspiring to watch how Jobs and his associates have grown these technologies to the point where they can be used as part of life's routine by average users, and as part of dealing with life's more special challenges by not-so average users².

A lot of words have been spilled about Apple's superior product design; there's a lot more to this than just good looks or good mechanical design. Apple's engineers and designers approach each product as a system, where good design has to include digital electronics, software, mechanical design, thermal packaging, noise management, and other aspects of the device as interacting and interdependent components. Several years ago I bought a flat-panel version of the iMac. My first act, after booting it up and confirming that it worked, was to open it up to upgrade the memory to its maximum. I took the opportunity to give the interior a careful examination, and was impressed to find that for engineering and design purposes, the iMac was a laptop with a slightly larger form-factor. All the lessons about mechanical and thermal design, and reliability that Apple had learned in the 5 or 6 generations of laptops up to that time had been applied to the iMac. This emphasis on systems design was a part of the demand of excellence that Steve Jobs made a point of in defining and marketing Apple products.

Many people have talked and written about Steve Jobs' eager grasp of the methods of marketing and capitalism, and his use of closed systems to increase his products' sales and profits. But I see all of the dealing and conniving and pursuit of profit as ways to bring to the market the tools that he envisioned as the basis for a widespread and long-term application of computers to the daily problems of large numbers of people. And I think that attaining this objective, and leaving behind an organization that will continue to follow his path for some time to come, is quite a bit of success for any one human lifetime, and certainly worthy of admiration.

^1. I got to use some Xerox Parc machines, including an Alto and a Magnolia, and (briefly) a Xerox Star, as well as several Tektronix computers based on the Parc designs. So I got early looks at bitmapped graphic displays with window GUIs using mice. And in 1983 I was hired by Tektronix to design a window-managed graphic system for their line of computer workstations.

^2. Since the late 1980's I've had a vision of a handheld computer that could effectively amplify the intelligence and memory of a user, whether to give people with special needs a boost up to more effectively live in the wider world or to give average people the tools to overcome some of the obstacles placed in their paths by the upper classes³; the iPod Touch/iPhone is that computer.

^3. One of the nastier tactics in the Class War is the way in which lower class people are pushed and persuaded to not use their money effectively; there are a number of apps for iPhones that make it easy to search for needed products and services at the best prices, and to budget money and find the best ways to pay for needed purchases so as to avoid usurious loans and gouging fees.

Two Movies: of Beauty and Evil

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:02:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I watched a movie called Water, and a couple of days later I watched another one called Never Let Me Go. Although they're very different movies in many ways: Water was made in India, and takes place in Varanasi on the Ganges in 1938, and Never Let Me Go takes place in an alternate history late 20th Century England, they are visually and dramatically beautiful films made with great craft. and they are both about societies which accept, even profit from, great evil. I was deeply moved by both films, and couldn't escape being seriously disturbed by the evil in both. Strangely, I had not heard of either one before watching them (I usually at least read a review in the local paper of any new movie, though I've been missing them more lately because we've been going to the theater perhaps once a year), but after watching the second one I immediately thought of their similarities. I'll talk more about the films and why they are alike after the cut. Caution: there are spoilers for both movies.

Water was released in 2005, directed and story written by Deepa Mehta, an Indian-born director living in Canada. It's the story of a group of widows forced to live in poverty in a temple on the Ganges, set against the backdrop of the struggle for independence as Ghandi travels by train to rally the people of India to the cause. It's important to understand the place of widows in Hindu society at this time: they effectively had none. Many of them were married in early childhood (as early as 4 or 5) to men much older than themselves, and widowed before they became old enough to meet their husbands. Once widowed they have the same status as their husbands: they are dead to both his family and their own; they may not work, they may not interact with men other than priests or holy men of some kind, and they may not marry again. And, as a priest explains to one of them late in the movie, these strictures were created so that the widows would not have to be supported by their families: it's all about money.

The main plot revolves around one of the widows, Kalyani, who is young and beautiful, and who has been pimped out by the leader of the widows for money to run the household. Narayan, a young Brahmin and follower of Ghandi falls in love with Kalyani and asks her to marry him, in defiance of his father and mother (not only is she a widow, she is also lower caste). Around this story, and woven through it, is the story of Chuyia, a seven year-old widow who is delivered to the widows' ashram by her parents at the beginning of the movie. She refuses to accept her status, rebelling, throwing tantrums, and winning Kalyani's affection and the grudging respect of some of the other widows.

The movie was filmed in ultrawide screen, and uses the format to the fullest, especially in the shots on the banks of the river. As far as I could see, all the shots, interior and exterior, day and night, were shot in available light (with some practical lighting in lanterns, and perhaps some reflector work, to highlight faces). Despite the low light levels the image quality is crisp; there's no more grain or noise in the night shots than the day. The palette is primarily earth tones and whites in the day shots, and blue-white and dark grays for the night shots. The resultant images are often quite painterly. Composition of the fixed camera shots is mostly very strong and simple, with bold foreground figures; some of the tracking shots are breathtaking, going from strong composition to strong composition through intermediate stages which are all equally strong. This movie really is a feast for the eyes.

The acting is almost uniformly excellent: all the characters, even the supporting characters, of whom there are more than 10, are portrayed with depth and care. This is the result of superior work on the part of all the actors and the writer/director. For instance, the leader of the widows, who maintains strict control of the actions of all the widows, cajoling and forcing conformance to the customs and rules of widowhood, and who breaks those rules by pimping one of her charges in order for the ashram to survive, is shown as more than a flat character containing nothing but evil. The role of complete evil is reserved for the men who demand and maintain the state of the widows for their own convenience, especially Narayan's father, who is revealed by the end of the movie to be a whoremonger and pedophile.

Never Let Me Go was adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is the story of three English children, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. They start the movie as students at a boarding school in the English countryside. Over the years they come to form a group, in which both Kathy and Ruth fall in love with Tommy, though Ruth deliberately steals Tommy from Kathy before Kathy admits her love. Shortly before graduation one of the teachers tells the children that they have been raised to be organ donors, and will die ("reach completion") before they are 30. They, the children around them, and all the adults in the school and outside, with the exception of the teacher who revealed their fate seem to accept this fate as fair and ethical.

After graduation Tommy and Ruth prepare to donate their organs, and Kathy becomes a "carer", someone who assists donors in accepting donation. By the end of the movie there have been mild objections to donation by a couple of ex-teachers from the childrens' school, which was shut down in favor of other techniques of raising donors which give them even less of a glimpse of life than Tommy, Ruth, and Kathy got. And at the end Tommy and Ruth have "completed", and Kathy is preparing for her first donation.

The acceptance with which the death of the children (who by this time are in their 20's but cannot be said to have been allowed to grow into a normal adult life) is viewed by the society they live in is truly horrifying; doctors, teachers, psychiatrists and other "caregivers" do their utmost to ensure that the donation process goes smoothly, sure in the knowledge that they will benefit from health organs should they become sick. Unlike in most other stories about oppression written in the West, especially in American science-fiction, there is no Resistance, no cabal of revolutionaries to save the donors. Why, people ask themselves in this alternative England, should we rebel against a policy that is so beneficial to us?

This movie is also very well mounted, though it's not quite so showy in its cinematography or its imagery. It's shot in standard widescreen format with pastel palette. Colors are not artificially desaturated, but they're not vivid; exterior shots are primarily in rural scenery with lots of light greens and interior shots contain a lot of blacks and whites. The result is an understated visual style which underscores the horror of the childrens' fate. The music is uniformly sad, at times almost wrenching in its emotional content.

The acting by the three principle characters is largely underplayed; they accept their fate and so believe they have nothing to regret about their lives and their deaths. They don't show deep emotion most of the time, because they've been raised in as stress-free a manner as possible, and their dialog and body language reflects this.

In both movies the theme of deeply-seated discrimination against a group of people based on the benefit to the rest of society, coupled with great, and largely unthinking, cruelty is contrasted to and underlined by visual beauty and understated action. This was, I think, a carefully-considered strategy by the filmmakers in both cases, and in both cases I think it's extremely successful. I highly recommend both movies, because of their themes and their craft. And I hope that other filmmakers follow their example in making films about horrific events and situations, whether fictional or real. Hitting the viewer over the head with a club has its place and its purpose (see Schindler's List or Carpenter's The Thing for good examples) but often the needle or the scalpel can do more with less.

Snarks in a M*F** Text!

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:17:00 +0000

Via Pharyngula, a generator for Lorem Ipsum babble text in the mode of Samuel L. Jackson. After the cut, because, after all, it sounds like Samuel L. Jackson.

Uuummmm, this is a tasty burger!

You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder. After the avalanche, it took us a week to climb out. Now, I don't know exactly when we turned on each other, but I know that seven of us survived the slide... and only five made it out. Now we took an oath, that I'm breaking now. We said we'd say it was the snow that killed the other two, but it wasn't. Nature is lethal but it doesn't hold a candle to man.

No, motherfucker

Normally, both your asses would be dead as fucking fried chicken, but you happen to pull this shit while I'm in a transitional period so I don't wanna kill you, I wanna help you. But I can't give you this case, it don't belong to me. Besides, I've already been through too much shit this morning over this case to hand it over to your dumb ass.

Uuummmm, this is a tasty burger!

Congratulations Are In Order!

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:52:00 +0000

I just got an email from my older son, telling me that he and his wife were both unanimously voted tenure by the members of their department at LSU. It's not official yet, there's lots of administrivia yet to be done, but that was the most critical step in the process. This has been one hella summer for them: first the baby and now a major step in both their careers. We're incredibly proud of them.

More Pictures of Ellie

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:47:00 +0000

I've uploaded all the pictures I took last week of Ellie to Picassa. There are two albums, "Ellie #1" and "Elllie #2". Link here.

My Grandchild ...

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 21:51:00 +0000

My grandchild is, of course, the cutest baby in the universe. She's just shy of 4 months old, and already knows all about performing, and holding the attention of the crowd. She's a happy baby, only cranky when she gets overtired or hungry. She's good with strangers, and strangers (or at least the grandparents she's never seen before) graduate to friends and family very quickly. Here's one picture, to give you a sense of why she's the best baby there is :-)

That's Eva (Grandma) holding Ellie. As you might expect, I've got about 60 or 70 more pictures of her, and I'll probably take a bunch more before we go back home on Monday. I'll start putting them up on the net, on either Flickr or Picassa most likely, in the next day or two.

Her name is Ellie, short for Ellanor (combining Ella Fitzgerald and Nora Jones, two of her parents' favorite singers. She seems to be quite at home in the heat and humidity of the Louisiana summer (which is more than I can say for myself). She really wants to get up and boogie, or at least crawl, and not being able to frustrates her sometimes. I think she's going to be a great kid, even discounting my prejudices.

UPDATE: There are more photos on my Flickr photo stream: Ellie at 3 1/2.

Travels and Home Maintenance

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:45:00 +0000

Just so you know why my posts and comments are going to be coming in sporadic bunches: we're simultaneously getting ready to go to Louisiana for a week to meet our brand-new grandchild and boxing up everything in the bottom floor of the house so we can move it all out and have the floors redone. What we have right now is really crappy grey carpet, which picks up dog smells like you wouldn't believe, and is currently several shades darker than it was when we first moved in (and cleaning it helps only temporarily). And since kids and grandchild are coming to visit us here in a month or so, we need to toss the carpet. Also, because our TV set is an old CRT model that weighs more than 150 pounds, and even together the two of us can't move it, let alone carry it upstairs, we're going to replace it with a flatpanel and let the recyclers haul it off. So there'll be lots to do in RL here for the next couple of weeks, and not much time to push electrons around. But if nothing else I'll post some pictures from Louisiana by the time I get back.

Give Me That Old Time Politics (A Modest Proposal)

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 02:11:00 +0000

Unlike half the (semi-)civilized world I haven't yet posted anything in my blog about the political singularity¹ in US politics that occurred a little while ago in the Great Deficit Debate². That's mostly because I'm thoroughly disgusted by the sheer stupidity, cupidity, and general malfeasance our political "representatives" have shown. But I have a modest proposal that might prevent such disasters in the future, one I first came up with many years ago, in a simpler time, when the crimes of our masters were simpler and perhaps more easily dealt with (and I didn't think my proposal was entirely justified. Now I do). After the cut, I'll give you the grisly details.

^1. Where "singularity'is defined as a change in technology or culture so great and so rapid that no one trying to forecast its effects beforehand can possibly do so. I think I can safely say that no one was crazy enough to predict as recently as a year ago the particularly insane and unnecessary game of "button, button, who's got the nuclear button" on the Republican side of the deficit debate countered by the response of "we win by caving in" that the Democrats and the President replied with.

^2. It's clear to me that the deficit is in their intelligence, not in our budget.

My idea harks back to the ancient era of the Greek city-states, when rulers were chosen by trial, often trial-by-combat, and the virtue of a great leader was considered a valuable resource, not to be squandered. So I suggest that from now on we select our leaders with great care, in competitive examinations of their knowledge, intelligence, physical prowess, and character, and allow them a single, fixed term of office, during which they can be challenged by others who believe themselves superior, so that we will always have in office the most qualified of all those who've sought the positions. And then at the end of their incumbency, whether they've lost out to a challenger or gotten to the end of their allotted time in office, we should hold a grand celebration, a feast in commemoration of their service to the nation, and there, amid toasts and laudatory speeches ... kill them and eat them.

This proposal would result in selection of public servants with a deep desire to sacrifice for the common good. It would mean that there would be a constant, Darwinian selection of the best of breed for each office. And it would ensure that the virtue embodied in these great statespeople would not be lost, but rather would be absorbed by those who assembled to celebrate their service. Of course it would probably be necessary to raffle off tickets to the celebratory banquet; even the most generous of officials couldn't possibly be stretched to serve all of the voters of the nation, even by the most ingenious of chefs³.

One additional benefit of this proposal is the reduction in the number of "elder statespersons", and the concomitant reduction in their memoirs, which are typically overly bombastic and self-absorbed. Instead, ghost-written biographies, of the sort rushed into print on the death of a public figure, could be published subsequent to the banquet. The subject of the book could even be given some choice as to the photograph to appear on the end flap before going to his or her final reward.

The one potential problem I foresee in implementing this proposal is the need to find an executive chef who is an expert in dealing with the more greasy and gamey sort of meat, for that is certainly what will be available, at least until the current supply of politicians is exhausted.

^3. I suppose some sort of "Politician Helper" could be developed by one of the convenience food vendors, but I think the dilution of virtue this would result in would be unacceptable.

Seniority

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:10:00 +0000

So last week I officially became a senior citizen: I turned 65, and am now on Medicare (thank Ghu: it's hundreds of dollars a month cheaper than the previous health insurance¹ I had, with pretty much comparable coverage). Of course this happened in front of the backdrop of OHNO DEBT DISASTER THROW MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY RECIPIENTS TO THE WOLVES!!!! I was beginning to wonder if there would be any Medicare by the time my eligibility kicked in, but luckily my coverage started Aug. 1, before Standard & Poors could downgrade US Government credit and turn us into a Third World nation.</sarcasm>

Oh, and another landmark: I am now a grandfather. My older son Alex and his wife Melissa now have a bouncing baby girl, Ellanor, born about a month ago. Because they're in Louisiana, we haven't seen her in person yet, but we've seen lots of pictures, and she is, of course, the cutest grandchild ever.

^1. And why, he asks rhetorically, do we need health insurance? Just give me health care, and we can eliminate the 15 or 20% of the health care expenses in the US the insurance companies eat without providing any useful good or service.

A Geometry for the Many-Angled Ones

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 04:35:00 +0000

You may know (or not) that I've become quite fond of the science fiction of Charlie Stross, a British writer living in Scotland, especially the "Laundry Files" series. The Laundry is a highly-classified British Intelligence and Counter-Espionage agency whose primary brief is the protection of the United Kingdom against the depredations of evil extra-dimensional beings who wish to invade, possess, destroy, and otherwise prey on humans and their world.

The basic conceit is that H. P. Lovecraft's writings are true: there are beings of great power lurking just around the corner in a higher-dimensional multiverse, beings who can be called forth using forms of geometry and computer software. In the world of the Laundry, Alan Turing didn't just invent the mathematical underpinnings of the theory of computation; the secret part of his work that the rest of the world didn't get to see shows how mathematics and computer programs can be used to do what amounts to "magic". Stross' hero, Bob Howard, is a middle-echelon IT sysadmin and secret agent, recruited into the Laundry just before his university computer graphics project could invite in beings that would have leveled the city of Wolverhampton¹.

Now it happens that I've been researching modern geometry in the last year or two. One of the subjects I've been studying intensively, for use in a software project I hope to blog about in the near future, is a field called "Geometric Algebra"². And Geometric Algebra just might be the geometry that Lovecraft's "Many-Angled Ones" use in navigating their sinister travels through the universes.. I'll explain more after the cut. Don't be too bothered by the mathematical terms; I'll try to summarize the meaning of it all so you won't have a mathematician to get it. And I'll try not to get eaten by the Great Old Ones before I finish.

One of the the things that always bugged me about geometry was that even after Klein's Erlangen Program³, which tried to build a single framework for all of geometry, there was no single formalism I had heard of that could contain geometries of different dimensions, like Plane and Solid Geometry, and that some of the more recent fields like differential geometry and linear algebra weren't coordinate-free, meaning that do any computation with them you've got use formulas that expand each point into a set of coordinate numbers, 1 for each dimension. Trying to learn about geometrical objects and their characteristics while hassling with the coordinates that describe them is really frustrating; all the coordinate shrubbery makes it hard to see the geometrical trees. Messing with the coordinates and having to think of everything as matrices is probably what's kept me from really learning Tensor Calculus and studying General Relativity, which is based on it.

But wait, there's hope, and it's not even new! Hermann Grassman developed an algebra in the mid-19^th century based on multiplying arbitrary numbers of vectors together to create other geometric objects in any dimension. So, for instance in the 2 dimensional plane, like you're looking at now:

A point is composed of 0 vectors:

A line is composed of 1 vector:

An area is composed of 2 vectors:

In 3D you have the point, line and area (a plane) as well as:

A volume is composed of 3 vectors:

... and so on ...

Grassman's work met with a deafening silence, and it wasn't until the year of his death that it was rediscovered by J. Willard Gibbs, who was inspired to invent the Vector Calculus (but not, regrettably, the Multivector Calculus). About the same time it was independently rediscovered by William Kingdon Clifford, who built what later was called Clifford Algebra on top of it. Clifford's algebra is composed of elements which are combinations of Grassman's multivectors. This algebra turns out to be what we now call "Geometric Algebra", at least after it in turn was forgotten and then rediscovered in the middle of the 20^th century.

Let's take a Clifford algebra for 3 dimensional Euclidean geometry, the kind they probably called "Solid Geometry" in your high-school geometry class as an example. The base geometry is constructed using three unit vectors at right-angles⁴, you can form any other vector by summing multiples of the unit vectors. So in classic Solid Geometry, what you have to work with when you want to compute the sizes, distances, and intersections of various geometric objects like lines and circles and planes and spheres is just vectors and their coordinates. That can get tedious. The Clifford Algebra that represents 3D Euclidean geometry has 8 components instead of 3: 1 number, 3 vectors, 3 bivectors (each the product of 2 vectors as in the drawing above), and 1 trivector (a volume). It turns out if you use combinations of these elements to describe your geometric objects you can do the same things you did before (you still have 3 vector components) but in addition, you can have additional data in those other components that let you find distances and intersections (and a lot of other useful information) using simple and (computationally) cheap numerical operations. And computationally cheap is exactly what you want when you're writing computer programs for graphics and visualization of geometry.

On top of that, it's easy to switch from Euclidean geometries to Non-Euclidean geometries in whatever dimensions you like, without changing the operations that work on the geometric objects. This is where the Many-Angled Ones would find it useful, because they could describe their own awful geometries in the same terms as our ordinary one, and perhaps even create geometries that bridge between the two. We'd better be careful how we use these tools lest some poor graduate student unwittingly open a portal into a dark universe and let loose something evil.

In the near future I'll post a description of the project I'm working for which I need Geometric Algebra; in the meantime, I highly recommend that you get a copy of the first Laundry novel, The Atrocity Archives.

^1. There seems to be some confusion about whether it was Wolverhampton or Birmingham that was almost annihilated, but as they're only about 15 miles apart I assume that the averted catastrophe would have fallen on them both.

^2.Not "Algebraic Geometry", René Descartes' bane of high school students . They're very different subjects.

^3.Klein managed to put Projective, Affine, Euclidean, Inversive, Spherical, and Hyperbolic geometries together by defining each as the study of those geometric entities that are invariant under certain classes of transformation. For instance, Euclidean geometry is invariant under translations, rotations, and reflections. But there's no good way to talk about the similarities and differences of 2 and 3 dimensional forms of these geometries, and so each kind is based on a grab-bag of special tricks and techniques. For instance, 3-dimensional rotations are often represented as quaternions, but there's no way to generalize quaternions to, say 2 dimensions, or 4 for that matter.

^4.Yes, I know that a basis set of vectors doesn't need to be either unitary or orthogonal, but I'm trying to keep it simple for the non-mathematicians who've made it this far. This description works "without loss of generality" as the saying goes.

... and One More Thing ...

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 18:58:00 +0000

Eek, yet another thing to take away time and energy. A couple of weeks ago I noticed a bump on my back that was rather tender. Went to the doctor and she diagnosed an infected cyst, so I went to a surgeon (who just happened to be the surgeon who performed Eva's lumpectomy last year, someone we both really liked and respected after that) who set up an outpatient procedure a week later, and pumped me full of antibiotics.

The procedure went very well, and the incision is completely uninfected, and healing rapidly; there was no pain at all in the operation site after a couple of days. However, whether it's a result of the anesthetic or just the requirements for healing, my body has decided it doesn't have the energy to do anything other than lie around and heal. After walking the dogs in the park, which involves about a quarter of a mile walk up and down a hill, I usually have to take a nap for an hour or two in the afternoon. And I haven't even had the concentration to read technical books, so my project is stalled at the moment.

It feels like my energy is slowly increasing, and I'm hoping that it will come back once my back is healed and I don't need to put all that energy into growing new flesh and killing off bacteria. I'm going to try to write a couple of blog entries in the next day or two, and we'll see how that goes.

Still Here After All This Time

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Sun, 29 May 2011 04:37:00 +0000

It's been a really long time since my last post on this blog. That was caused by a number of things: recovery from surgery was slower than I expected, at least in terms of getting back the energy to do things during the day. For awhile there it was all I could do to go to the park and sit for an hour while the dogs walked around. It took almost six months to get up the energy to walk any distance myself, but once I started doing that, my energy started coming back at a faster pace. Now I can do 3 or 4 hours of (mostly non-physical) work a day after walking the dogs.

But once I had the energy, more things intervened. Our Lhasa Apso, Jemma, suddenly (over the course of 2 or 3 weeks) went blind. We spent some time going to vets and not getting a definitive diagnosis until we saw a veterinary opthalmologist. He diagnosed SORD (Sudden Onset Retinal Disorder), a disorder whose etiology and mechanism are pretty much unknown, but whose prognosis is 100% blindness in almost all cases, and which has no treatment. Jemma has been blind now for several months, and has mostly acclimated herself to it. Dogs aren't as strongly affected by blindness as humans, because smell and hearing are so much more acute for them. Jemma's only serious problem (aside from a non-related eye infection that lasted several weeks) is that when she gets excited or upset she gets disoriented and gets stuck in loops between obstacles, going back and forth until she accidentally goes off at an angle and misses one of them. We''re working with her on that, but she is a very stubborn dog (a breed quality) and is having trouble taking direction when she gets that way. Spencer, our Rat Terrier, has been very solicitous of her, following her and trying to help her (though not very consistently). He has come to get us a couple of times when she got into trouble in the back yard.

The other thing that's been keeping me from the blog is a project I've started. Now that I'm able to do useful work at least part of the day, I've decided to come partially out of retirement and create software that, with a little luck, I can sell to bring in a little extra money; at least enough, I hope, to pay for the additional hardware and software I've had to buy for the development work (that's not really a lot, but retirement hasn't been quite what it was supposed to be, thanks to the Current Financial Unpleasantness). I've got a project that I think I can do myself, one that I've been thinking about off and on for a year or so. It will start out as a Macintosh application, sold through Apple's Mac App Store, and if that's successful, I plan to port it to the iPad. Details in a near future blog post.

I'll continue to post here, but probably not as often as I was doing last fall. I'll be spending about 20 hours a week on the software project, and that will include some postings on a new blog I'm setting up now along with a website for the company that will sell the software. I'll post the details for the new site and blog here soon.

Swimming Towards the Surface

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:41:00 +0000

As some of you few may know, I had back surgery a little over a week ago, and that's why there've been no posts for awhile. The recovery is going well, and I"m not as spaced out by the pain relief drugs as I was at first, so I'll be easing my way back into a life on the Web as well as in the Real World starting about now.

I'd like to thank Eva for taking care of me (and the dogs) so well and so carefully; I quite literally could not have done it without her.

More Poetry in Stock Than Ever Before!

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:23:00 +0000

I have finally gathered all my poems from the archives of Making Light and put them onto my own web site, The Den of SpeakerToManagers, on the Miscellaneous Sonnets and Other Poems page. As the title implies, they're mostly sonnets, with a couple of villanelles thrown in for good measure. The poems are in chronological order of writing, the oldest at the top of the page. I hope you enjoy reading them.

ETA: I'll be fixing up the typography and the layout of the poems in the near future, but the content will remain the same.

Arise Ye Prisoners of Starvation

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:05:00 +0000

The other day I watched "Capitalism: A Love Story" for the first time (we don't go to the movie theater but once or twice a year, so we have to wait for things to be put on cable), and was blown away by the trailing title song: a jazz version of The Internationale (in English). Listen for yourself:

Back for a Bit

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:03:00 +0000

This blog has been very quiet the last few weeks. One of the reasons is that Eva has been going through a course of radiation therapy for the last 6 or 7 weeks; that's kept me busy driving her to the hospital every day, plus doing the chores that she hasn't been able to do because of the fatigue the therapy causes. In addition, I've had some medical appointments of my own, as I try to figure out what to do about my back. But now Eva's therapy is done, and I've come close to having some resolution on my own case, so I expect to be writing more, at least for the next few weeks.

More details on both Eva's and my medical adventures below the fold.

A few months ago Eva had an overdue mammogram done, and the results were ambiguous, so the doctor ordered more tests. This resulted in several X-rays, ultrasounds, and MRIs, all somewhat ambiguous, and ultimately in a biopsy. The biopsy showed what's called a Stage 0 ductal carcinoma in-site (DCIS), a small cluster of cancer cells walled up in a cyst in a duct in her left breast. This is the earliest, and the most easily and successfully treatable breast cancer, for which we are both tremendously grateful. We immediately scheduled a lumpectomy, which was completely successful; a lymph node biopsy at the same time showed that the cancer had not spread at all.

The standard treatment after this type of lumpectomy is a 6 week course of targeted radiation therapy: a beam of gamma rays aimed just at the area of that breast that contained the cancer. Statistically, the oncologist told us, this treatment reduces the probability of recurrence of the cancer from something like 18% to around 7% (I'm convinced from what I've read that Eva is on the far low-probability end of the distribution curve for recurrence to start with, so the reduction caused by the radiation makes a recurrence highly unlikely).

So the treatment is done, and now Eva needs a couple of weeks to get over the side-effects of the radiation: some fatigue and a lovely suntan on her left breast. On the last day of the treatment Eva told the technician that this was the worst tanning salon she'd ever been to: they couldn't even get both breasts the same color.

As for me, I've been talking to spine and neuro-surgeons; the partner of the spine surgeon who did my last surgery (see "A Very Sad Story" for what happened to him) has proposed another operation, somewhat less complicated than the previous one, but at several levels of my lumbar spine, to repair the damage caused by 2 disks that have ruptured, and to open up the foramina (the holes through which the nerves exit the spinal column) which are compressing the nerve roots going to my legs. I'm leaning strongly towards doing the operation, but I'm waiting right now for the neurosurgeon I saw to consult with the spine surgeon and give him any input he has on my problems. They're having trouble getting together because they have opposite schedules: when one is in his office the other is operating, and vice versa. They're working on it.

The End of the World Cup Game

noreply@blogger.com (SpeakerToManagers) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:40:00 +0000

Really, you had to be there.

Rumblings From the Speaker

Down the Rabbit Hole with Sketchbook and Camera

Down By Law: Unequal Enforcement and Unequal Laws

Way to go Curiosity!

Oh, Too Bad ... It's Illegal

A Message the 0.1% Might Not Like (but the rest of us would)

Geometry As An Interactive Design Space

If You Want War, Prepare For War.

Stop SOPA Before it Stops the Internet!

Steve Jobs: Say What you Want About Him, He's Left the World Changed.

Two Movies: of Beauty and Evil

Snarks in a M*****F****** Text!

Uuummmm, this is a tasty burger!

No, motherfucker

Uuummmm, this is a tasty burger!

Congratulations Are In Order!

More Pictures of Ellie

My Grandchild ...

Travels and Home Maintenance

Give Me That Old Time Politics (A Modest Proposal)

Seniority

A Geometry for the Many-Angled Ones

... and One More Thing ...

Still Here After All This Time

Swimming Towards the Surface

More Poetry in Stock Than Ever Before!

Arise Ye Prisoners of Starvation

Back for a Bit

The End of the World Cup Game

Snarks in a M*F** Text!