a sibilant intake of breath

Concept for a secret communication system

Milan — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:00:10 +0000

What you need

In order to use this system you will need two computers (which could include phones or other devices) with the same chess-playing software installed on them. The software must always suggest at least two moves for any given board position, and it must always produce the same suggestions based on a particular board arrangement.

For instance, in a game that opens with white moving the king’s pawn two spaces forward (e4 in algebraic notation), the software must always recommend the same set of countermoves. It might recommend the Sicilian Defence (c5) as the highest ranking move, followed by an open game as the top alternative (e5). By choosing c5, the correspondent would indicate a ’0′ and by choosing e5 they would indicate a ’1′. It is essential that both players have software that suggests the same moves based on a given board position. It is this determined character that allows the communication system to work.

Sending a message

In order to send a message, it must first be converted into binary code. A simple way of doing this is to start with ASCII text and use an ASCII to binary converter. For example, we might wish to send the message “Your telephone has been tapped”. Converted into binary, this encodes as:

“010110010110111101110101011100100010000001110100011001010110110001100101011100000110100001101111011011100110010100100000011010000110000101110011001000000110001001100101011001010110111000100000011101000110000101110000011100000110010101100100″.

In order to send the message, it is simply necessary to look at the two top moves suggested by the chess-playing software. In the event that you want to transmit a ’0′ then you should select the topmost move. In the event that you wish to transmit a ’1′ use the second topmost move. Because the person who you are talking to will also be running the software, it will be immediately obvious to them which digit you intend to transmit. Because both of the top moves are likely to be reasonable chess moves, the game will look fairly ordinary to anyone intercepting the communication.

One option is to have each correspondent make moves in alternating fashion. In that way, each can send a message to the other simultaneously. Alternatively, one person can send a message while the other simply provides countermoves to maintain the impression of a game being played. Alternatively, a single player can transmit moves for both white and black. They could use each to encode a different message, or they could use both together for a single stream.

In order to send a long message, it would take quite a few chess games. There would also need to be a system in place for when there is only one legal move possible, or none at all. I suggest that whenever a situation arises where fewer than two legal moves exist, the ongoing game be abandoned by the resignation of one player and a new one be started.

Automation

The whole thing could be set up to run automatically – for instance, on cellular phones. You could put the text to be transmitted into an app and it could automatically query a database of chess moves. It could then transmit the appropriate move to a chess server which the other correspondent would be connected to. The rate of transmission could be automatically limited in order to maintain the illusion of a game of chess being played, or it could be allowed to run at a high speed in order to send messages quickly. In either case, the data being transmitted would consist of valid chess moves and the game being played would look fairly normal.

Super-encipherment

Naturally, it would also be possible to use an encryption algorithm to turn a plaintext message into a binary string. This could either be a symmetric key cipher with a key that the correspondents have agreed to beforehand, a public key system based on public and secret keys, or an online key exchange system like Diffie–Hellman. This would provide some protection against an attacker who realizes the chess games are being used to transmit a message.

Alternative mechanism

As an alternative to chess-playing software, each player could also look at one of the chess game analyzing websites that ranks moves by popularity. The most popular move could code for a ’0′ while the second most popular move could code for a ’1′. Over time, the popularity of moves in the database may change. This shouldn’t be a problem for communication happening in real time, and could be useful insofar as it would make it difficult for anyone trying to decipher the message later to do so.

Obviously, this system could be used for games other than chess. All that is necessary is that both players have access to the same ranking of moves, so that each move can be translated reliably into the appropriate binary digit and from there into plain text. In games where a fairly large number of moves are always possible, the system could be extended beyond binary and longer messages could be concealed in fewer games. For instance, if there were always ten possible ranked moves, each option could be used to convey a decimal digit between ’0′ and ’9′.

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Manic

Milan — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:00:54 +0000

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Sasha and Milan

Milan — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:00:33 +0000

Photo by Ihor Ilnyckyj

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John Ivison is wrong about climate ethics

Milan — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:57:15 +0000

Writing recently in the National Post, John Ivison was dismissive of the views of the scientist James Hansen:

So overblown is Mr. Hansen’s rhetoric that it is easily dismissed. This, after all, is the man who, for all his scientific credibility, has said climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery.

I don’t think the comparison between slavery and unrestrained climate change is unrealistic. Under slavery, the rights and welfare of one group of people (slaves) were ignored so that the wealth and privileges of another group (slave owners) could be protected. When we burn fossil fuels, we are making a similar assertion that our interests count, while those of all the people who will suffer from climate change do not.

What Ivison misunderstands is the instability of the climate system. A human being who has lived for a few decades under a largely stable (though increasingly destabilized) climate regime has no ability to intuitively comprehend how the climate system as a whole responds to forcings. We do, however, have paleoclimatic records that stretch back for hundreds of thousands of years and which reveal that the climate can be a very unstable phenomenon when subjected to such stresses.

Even under a business-as-usual scenario, in which humanity keeps burning a quantity of fossil fuels similar to what we are burning now, it is likely that the climate will warm by more than 4˚C by the end of the century. That would quite likely involve large-scale global impacts, like the progressive disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets (with accompanying sea level rise) and major changes in precipitation patterns (stressing global agriculture). If we are not to fundamentally and essentially permanently alter the climate that human beings have relied upon since the emergence of our species, we need to aggressively scale back the use of fossil fuels. Far from building new oil pipelines and coal-fired power plants, humanity should be working out the most efficient way to shut down the ones we have.

When we carry on with fossil fuels because they happen to be convenient to us, we are imposing suffering and death on our fellow human beings. By threatening substantial increases in sea level, we are threatening the existence of entire low-lying countries. Hansen isn’t wrong to say that climate change is a moral issue on par with slavery; people like Ivison are wrong to dismiss Hansen’s concerns because they can’t imagine the world changing so much.

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Cattails

Milan — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:00:09 +0000

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Red branches

Milan — Sun, 13 May 2012 10:00:27 +0000

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Tattooed head

Milan — Sat, 12 May 2012 10:00:42 +0000

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Scarborough Bluffs

Milan — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:00:38 +0000

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Instapaper and the Kindle

Milan — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:40 +0000

Instapaper and the Kindle make a good combination.

You can set up Instapaper to assemble a digest periodically from stories that you have identified as interesting. It will email that digest to Amazon’s free conversion service, Amazon will convert the file into a Kindle-friendly format, and the file will download via WiFi when it is ready.

I have it set to produce a daily digest, but the appropriate setting probably varies depending on how often you have time to read interesting but non-essential material.

One Instapaper tip: Always use the ‘Instapaper Text’ browser button before the ‘Read Later’ browser button. When I click the ‘Read Later’ button directly on websites, Firefox often crashes completely. When I click ‘Instapaper Text’ first, then ‘Read Later’, it almost never crashes.

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Yinka Dene Alliance resisting the Northern Gateway pipeline

Milan — Thu, 10 May 2012 10:00:24 +0000

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The Unfolding of Language

Milan — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:38:09 +0000

The key argument in Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention grows out of the subtitle. Deutscher argues convincingly that languages branch and mutate much like species, though the process is different in that it occurs within and between the minds of human beings. People working to express themselves both concisely and forcefully continuously change their languages, building up complex grammatical structures and other linguistic elements while also shortening and simplifying and forgetting. As with biological evolution, the process of change leaves traces:

For whenever one finds impressive edifices in language, one is also likely to find scores of imperfections, a tangle of irregularities, redundancies, and idiosyncracies that mar the picture of a perfect design. (p.40 paperback)

All the complexities of this process exceed the scope of what any linguist or group of linguists can ever really track, since we are all involved in the re-invention of language whenever we communicate. Still, Deutscher is able to draw on examples from many languages to demonstrate and defend his argument, all while openly acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and the questions that can only be answered partially and by conjecture.

There are no doubt readers who will revel in every example in Deutscher’s 274 pages plus appendices, but I personally found myself well convinced of his basic thesis by the time I was halfway through. The key to understanding it comes in the second chapter, in which Deutscher draws attention to how we are all exposed to a whole spectrum of usage of any particular language during the ordinary course of life. We deal with upper class speakers who are pernickety about rules of grammar and with rebellious teenagers who develop their own cryptic argots and transfer patterns of abbreviation from text messages and Twitter into their love letters and academic papers. With so much variation at a single point in time, it is no surprise that language as a whole can drift across time, without ever creating solid breaks where people stop being able to understand one another. A word like ‘willy-nilly’ can go from meaning ‘whether you like it or not’ to ‘done in a haphazard way’ without anyone imposing that change on the language, and without the word becoming incomprehensible to anyone.

Speaking of this linguistic evolution generally, Deutscher says:

[T]his invention is not the design of any one architect, nor does it follow the dictates of any master plan. It is the result of thousands of small-scale spontaneous analogical innovations, introduced by order-craving minds across the ages. So while language may never have been invented, it was nonetheless shaped by the attempts of generations of speakers to make sense of the mass of details they have to absorb. (208)

Deutscher goes on to explain:

The elaborate conventions of language needed no gifted inventor to conceive them, no prehistoric assembly of elders to decree their shape, nor even an overseer to guide their construction. Of course, saying that language changes ‘of its own accord’ does not mean that it evolved independently of people’s actions. Behind the forces of change there are always people – the speakers of a language.

For my part, I am trying to change the general convention on punctuation and quotation marks. It would also be nice if English dealt with possession and contraction in a less confusing way.

Deutscher’s account of metaphors in language is also convincing and worthy of attention. He shows how we reach out to metaphors in an effort to make our points clearly and forcefully. (So many metaphors, when you start looking! Reaching out! Points! Clarity! Forcefulness! All concrete concepts being used to express abstract ideas.) The book is also scattered throughout with charming little facts about the history of words and how they have changed across time, including extremely common words with non-obvious origins. Deutscher also makes good use of humour in pointing out some of the stranger aspects of language. For example, Deutscher quotes Mark Twain’s priceless poem mocking German along with doggerel making fun of the inconsistencies in English spelling.

Deutscher’s book was recommended to me by Stephen Fry- not directly, but in his comforting and inspiring ‘podgram’ on language. I made extensive use of that podgram in shaking off the absurdly parochial and self-righteous perspective on English maintained by the creators of the Graduate Record Examination. Deutscher’s book is a similarly effective response to anyone who assumes that their language – as they happen to speak it – is correct and eternal and that all variations are representative of the failures in the education of other people. Language is something we all do together – one of the most important inheritances of humanity. Both Fry and Deutscher are right to wish that language were taught and understood more as a participatory process than as a set of rules to be followed.

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Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)

Milan — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:00:24 +0000

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Links for 2010-11-12 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:00:00 PST

An Open Letter to Wired Magazine
Come to think of it, the last time that a woman was featured on your cover, because she was being featured in the magazine for an actual accomplishment, was way back in 1996 when it was Sherry Turkle, the academic and author. And, the only other time was in 1994, when musician/author Laurie Anderson was featured. Because since then, I guess no women have done anything notable in technology unless it had to do with their bodies? Really?

Links for 2010-11-10 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 PST

Supply-Side Virus Strikes Again - By Paul Krugman - Slate Magazine
The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant--that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.

Links for 2010-11-09 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 00:00:00 PST

Robert Christgau: Frank Sinatra 1915-1998
It's no surprise that among the post-Presley young he gets a lot more guys than gals. The gals have other ways to get off now--provisional romance is one thrill among many rather than the precondition of any thrill at all. The guys, on the other hand, admire Sinatra because he personified a style and an era in which guys still held all the big cards. And they admire the way he made gross material acquisitiveness seem classy instead of just classbound.
Geopolitical Journey, Part 1: The Traveler | STRATFOR
Nations and empires are living things until they die. While they live they grow to the limits set by other nations. They don’t grow like this because they are evil. They do this because they are composed of humans who always want to be more secure, more prosperous and more respected. It is inconceivable to me that Russia, alive and unrestrained, would not seek to return to what it once was.
To block EPA regulations, Koch Industries expands lobbying campaign to children | Grist
Koch Industries, the privately owned industrial conglomerate, is using any available method to fight the enforcement of laws to limit its toxic pollution. This summer's "Regulation Reality Tour," produced by Koch's grassroots marketing arm Americans for Prosperity (AFP), featured a "moon bounce in the shape of a SWAT car for children," ostensibly symbolizing the boogeyman of Environmental Protection Agency "Carbon Cops." "Let's make sure we keep doing our part to ensure that our generation passes on to our children and grandchildren the same freedoms we enjoyed," AFP cries, in protest of sewage overflow rules.

Links for 2010-11-08 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 PST

Siddhartha Mukherjee has a powerful new metaphor in Emperor of All Maladies. - By Amanda Schaffer - Slate Magazine
This imagery reflects a contemporary, molecularly sophisticated view of cancer cells as savvy, prolific, and immortal. It provides a unified way of thinking about a disease that has come to seem less like one problem with one potential solution than it ever has before. In fact, this imagery carries a more dire implication: If the enemy is ourselves, only better, there may be no solution. As Mukherjee himself wonders, if cancer cells are more wily and adaptable than we are, is it possible finally to defeat them—and if so, by what strategies? Maybe we must ultimately accept cancer, to some degree, as the "inherent outer limit of our survival"—an inevitable offshoot of growth and aging that we might learn to hold at bay but can never truly eradicate.
Al Qaeda Unlucky Again in Cargo Bombing Attempt | STRATFOR
The details that we have been able to collect so far concerning the configuration of the devices is that both were camouflaged in parcels and both contained a main charge of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) that was to be detonated by a primary explosive charge of lead azide. PETN is a military-grade explosive commonly found in detonating cord and some plastic explosives. PETN was also the primary explosive in the underwear bomb used in AQAP’s failed Christmas Day attack as well as its attempted assassination of Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef using an IED concealed inside the attacker’s body. Lead azide is a common primary explosive used in detonators, and it can also be used to effectively detonate an explosive such as PETN. According to media reports, the two devices contained 10.58 ounces and 15.11 ounces of PETN, both of which are larger charges than the 2.8 ounces contained in the Christmas Day device

Links for 2010-11-02 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 PDT

Morals at the ballot box: If you're reading this, thanks for voting | The Economist
I argue that while citizens have no duty to vote, if they do vote, they must vote well—on the basis of sound moral and empirical beliefs in order to promote the common good—or otherwise they are morally obligated to abstain. Though individual votes make no significant difference to political outcomes, bad voting violates either a duty not to participate in collectively harmful activities or a duty not to participate in collective activities that impose undue risk upon innocent people
Tea-party blues: I still say we're doomed | The Economist
The tea-party movement is two different things: a bunch of spontaneous conservative gatherings, and a few well-financed, experienced and professional conservative political organisations under a new brand. The tea-party movement is spontaneous, and it has been effective. But where it is spontaneous, it is not effective, and where it is effective, it is not spontaneous.

Links for 2010-11-01 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 PDT

C.K. Chivers' The Gun explains how the AK-47 changed the world. - By Nicholas Schmidle - Slate Magazine
The Kalashnikov was originally touted as a weapon to resist imperialism, capitalism—in short, the United States. But Cold War advertising rarely aligned with reality. The rifle's operational debut came in 1956, when the Red Army rolled into Hungary to crush a popular uprising in the streets of Budapest. Two events in Budapest that autumn foreshadowed the Kalashnikov's future. First, in the process of ruthlessly suppressing the revolution, the Kalashnikov emerged as "repression's chosen gun, the rifle of the occupier and the police state." More important, it quickly fell into the hands of rebels who deciphered the gun's simple mechanics and used it against Soviet-backed soldiers, even executing one lieutenant in broad daylight. Here was a weapon anyone could use—and use over and over. The Kalashnikov was "so reliable, even when soaked in bog water and coated with sand," Chivers writes, "that its Soviet testers had trouble making it jam."

Links for 2010-10-27 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 PDT

CBC News - Politics - Canada's public service rated less corrupt
Canada rose to sixth place in having the most trustworthy public sector worldwide, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Corruption Perceptions Index calculated Canada's score as 8.9 out of 10 on a survey concerning whether public servants use their positions for private gain.

The country's score was a slight improvement from its 8.7 score in 2009, but the gain was enough to push Canada up two spots in 2010.