MemeMachineGo!

From the A Word a Day mailing list:

Our seven-year-old daughter Ananya has developed an interest in etymology. Often she’ll interrupt her play in the backyard and peek in my downstairs study to ask about whatever word comes to her mind. Some time back she barged in with, “So how did the word dog came about?” I explained to her that the word dog came from Middle English dogge which came from Old English docga. Satisfied, she went back to her play.

I had completely forgotten about it when a few days later I overheard her
talking to her grandmother on the phone, “Amma, we got a dogga.” I was
puzzled and later asked why she said dogga instead of dog. She patiently
explained, “You know, Amma is old. That’s why I used Old English with her.”

Mick LaSalle on Showgirls:

A camp classic can only be made accidentally. If you try to make camp, you just end up with something smirky and self-protective. Nine years after its release, “Showgirls” is a camp masterpiece, a movie worth watching over and over again because it features not only one of the worst lead performances in film history, but one of the most astonishingly misguided. Elizabeth Berkley thought she was playing a sexy woman (nope), a good dancer (nope), a sympathetic character (nope), a determined artist (ha!) and an interesting, complex woman (uh, no). At the time, I considered “Showgirls” one of the worst films of 1995, but I don’t think I’ve watched any other 1995 release more than this one. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its amazing awfulness. It’s 131 minutes of jaw-droppingly tasteless, crazily written, badly acted, mind-bogglingly strange scenes, and as such it is never, ever dull.

Roger Ebert on The Village:

Eventually the secret […] is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we’re back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

(Ebert link via Defective Yeti)

There’s a Garry Trudeau interview in Rolling Stone.

Turns out he’s boyhood friends with Howard Dean, and knew Bush at Yale.

We [Bush and Trudeau] both served on the Armour Council, which was the social committee for our residential college. Nobody in my freshman dorm knew what the council was. But I apparently had shown some leadership qualities in the first three or four days of school, so I was elected unanimously. George Bush was chairman. Our duties consisted of ordering beer kegs and choosing from among the most popular bands to be at our mixers. He certainly knew his stuff — he was on top of it [laughs].

Even then he had clearly awesome social skills. Legend has it that he knew the names of all forty-five of his fellow pledges when he rushed Deke. He later became rush chairman of Deke — I do believe he has the soul of a rush chairman. He has that ability to connect with people. Not in the empathetic way that Clinton was so good at, but in the way of making people feel comfortable.

He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable. He was very good at all the tools for survival that people developed in prep school — sarcasm, and the giving of nicknames. He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.

=v= I haven't been blogging much; I've been busy with activism. Seems I moved to New York City just in time to get involved with groups who all have something to say about the impending Republican National Convention.

I and my fellow eco-bike activists are mostly working on a Bike National Convention, showing our vision of a positive alternative to what the warmongering oilgarchs are going to be hyping one week later. The event I look most forward to is with a group called Greene Dragon, a Paul Revere's Ride to Lexington (Ave.) to warn people that The Republicans Are Coming.

Everyone, come to New York City and bring your bike -- or rent one from our community bikes program. We've also got bike blocs and other events going on during the RNC.

Oh, and if you're already in these parts, tomorrow is the 10th Anniversary of the Central Park Moonlight Ride, and next week is the second Brooklyn Critical Mass ride. (Lotsa URLs there, huh? I told you I've been busy!)

A Popular Science writer spends ten days without technologies more recent than 50 years old.

When friends heard about my foray into the simple life, they were evenly split as to whether the lack of e-mail or cellphone would break me first. Both camps were wrong: It’s the bad coffee that’s killing me. “In 1954, most home coffee drinkers in the U.S. used electric percolators,” explains Gregory Dicum, author with Nina Luttinger of The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop, when I called him for input. “And make sure you brew it weakly,” he instructs. “You should be able to see your spoon all the way to the bottom of a ’50s-style coffee cup.”

Chock full of fun info like how Prohibition killed rye and how Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road.

(Via Boing Boing)

Bart Simpson:

If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.

The French way too, it seems.

Corinne Maier’s tongue-in-cheek book Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness, has earned her a disciplinary hearing. Hello Laziness or “the art of doing the least work possible for your employer” was written as a comic antidote to all the “how to succeed” management books.

But sadly, Ms Maier’s bosses haven’t seen the funny side.[…]

It was Ms Maier’s advice to readers that probably stung the most: “You don’t have much to lose if you don’t do much at work,” she wrote, telling readers to choose the most useless sort of job - become a consultant, an expert or an adviser.

A while ago, I asked:

Much has been written about the golden ratio in art and architecture and music.

Has anyone sought it in fiction?

Well,

Howard Suber, a film historian and prof at UCLA has posited that the Golden Section is used for a great deal of storytelling, particularly in screenwriting. There is a point, which any screenwriting how to book will mention, 2 thirds of the way thru the script, where the action takes a twist: the protaganist who previously "reacted" will begin to "act". Suber calls this the one hour pivot point as it usually falls 60 minutes into a 90 minute movie (ie, at the golden section).

Suber mentions this on what I believe is the greatest film commentary ever recorded: Criterion’s laserdisc for The Graduate. Though out of print, occasionally copies can be found on ebay. I highly recommend it. I learned more about storytelling and filmmaking from Suber’s 105 minute commentary than I did in four years of film school.

I’m about ready to make Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 my home page.

You, too, can compulsively refresh it to see the latest poll results by state translated into an overall prediction.

At the moment, Kerry leads 307 to 231. But 104 votes are from states whose majorities only ‘barely’ favors one candidate, while the majorities of 115 more ‘weakly’ favor one candidate. 270 votes takes it.

So it could go any which way.

Assuming, y’know, no one cheats.

Boy, sometimes you just blink and it seems like days have gone by since you updated your weblog.

I’ve got a contracting gig. It’s keeping me busy.

Regularly scheduled weblogging will resume later…

P: Were you up till the middle of the night?

Z: Yes.

P: What were you doing?

Z: Looking up the algorithm to find the longest common substring.

(pause)

P: Whatever. I’ll just assume you were looking at Internet porn.

The Strange Case of the Latin Lover:

A mystery writer could not have plotted it better: an ancient convent perched atop a 2,500ft peak in eastern France, a locked library containing a priceless collection of early printed books and illuminated manuscripts, a secret passage - and a series of spectacular and inexplicable thefts.

The 8th-century convent of Mont Sainte-Odile towers over the picturesque small town of Saverne in the foothills of the Vosges mountains. One of the most popular attractions in Alsace, tens of thousands of people a year tour its abbey, church, chapel and cloisters, dine in its hotel and restaurants and admire the stunning view across the plain to the river Rhine and, beyond, the Black Forest.

Among them, from August 2000, was a curiously well-informed thief. From that date, a succession of immensely valuable works, including precious early religious texts and several dozen heavy 15th-century illuminated manuscripts bound in wood and leather, began disappearing from the abbey’s first-floor library.

(I’ll link to pretty much any news story with a secret passage in it.)

After a week of almost no blogging, I’ve had a day chock full of maintaining the blog.

MMG’s host’s sysadmin had updated some Perl modules, and my instance of MT Blacklist broke (I found the fix on this Taiwanese/English blog). And though my automated comment spam had trickled to a minimum after taking steps previously mentioned, those measures have since failed, and I was getting deluged.

So I’ve taken further measures to stay a few steps ahead of the spammers.

While doing so, I thought of a complicated scheme. Require users to preview their comment before they can post it. When they hit preview and the server sends the posting form, it slips in a hidden field encrypted by a PGP public key that contains a coded version of the time, a unique identifier (which the blog software stores together on the server side.) Users are warned that they only have, say, 15 minutes to post their comment after hitting preview (but, of course, they can request another preview, get another unique identifier, and start the clock running again.)

Upon submitting the form, the server decrypts the unique identifier and timestamp, looks up the identifier. If it doesn’t exist, or it was issued more than the given amount of time ago, the comment is rejected.

This means that spammers couldn’t just forge their own forms and submit them to your server (as they easily can today with default Movable Type installations). They’d have to request and parse your preview form first.

Unfortunately, this scheme would work only until a spammer felt like building a robot to automate doing just that, which wouldn’t be any great trick. And it’d cut through all the cleverness with the encrypted timestamp just as easily as it could a dumb hidden magic word field. The only advantage would be their limited time window to spam… which wouldn’t be an advantage once the spammer has compensated for it.

It’s another club solution. It would offer only relative security — it could make it less attractive for them to hit some particular blog in the short run, but once a large plurality of blogs had it, they would all become equally attractive again.

What we really need are omnipotent alien overlords who hate spam. That’d pretty much solve it.

At PerlMonks today:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

     my$f=           $[;my

   $ch=0;sub       l{length}

 sub r{join"",   reverse split

("",$_[$[])}sub ss{substr($_[0]

,$_[1],$_[2])}sub be{$_=$_[0];p

 (ss($_,$f,1));$f+=l()/2;$f%=l 

  ();$f++if$ch%2;$ch++}my$q=r

   ("\ntfgpfdfal,thg?bngbj".    

    "naxfcixz");$_=$q; $q=~

      tr/f[a-z]/ [l-za-k] 

        /;my@ever=1..&l

          ;my$mine=$q

            ;sub p{

             print

              @_;

               }

                         

       be $mine for @ever

Yes, that’s working Perl code. No, not all Perl code looks like that. The heart shape is totally optional. It produces the output:

kristen, will you marry me?

The poster’s intended said yes. Awww…

French history and American ingratitude:

The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like “I Hate France,” with supposed datelines of French military history, supposedly proving how the French are total cowards. […1 Well, I’m going to tell you guys something you probably don’t want to hear: these sites are total bullshit, the notion that the French are cowards is total bullshit, and anybody who knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over the past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in Europe, maybe the world.

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry ‘do and the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful.

Here’s a list of Discordian Games like 1000 blank cards.

1000 Blank White Cards is a card game, the purpose of which is to create the cards you’re playing with.

Not on the list is Cosmic Poker, or 5 Card Catma.

The object of Five-card Catma is to display the “truest” and most imaginative creation myth in the room, using only five cards to tell your story of how the universe came into being. As in poker, a dealer deals five [homemade Tarot] cards to each player. After receiving their initial five cards, each player can discard as many as three cards to risk obtaining a better” hand. When all hands are fixed and it is time to show,” one by one each player narrates his/her creation myth, utilizing the cards to animate the story. Players can also fold, forfeit the game, and watch. Those who play it out do so until one creation myth stands out as the best. This could be a funny, somber, erotic, oppressive or totally dull story; the nature of the myth seems incidental to its truth factor. As strange as this may sound, there’s never been any question about which story won as long as I’ve played this game.

Perl is Internet Yiddish

Yiddish is the caring, authoritative inscrutability of your elders. It has rules, but they’re mainly inherited from the tributary languages. It’s inconsistent in a way that shows it doesn’t matter. It sounds like a beautiful mess (which, considering its mainly Germanic origins, is quite an achievement). Well, it sounds beautiful to me, anyway. Others think it’s just a mess - there’s a famous National Lampoon “Teach Yourself Yiddish” piece that recommends you make up vaguely German/Russian-sounding words that start with “sch” and just string them together.

Let’s talk a bit more about the make-up of Yiddish: it’s mainly German, that much is obvious, but the vocab is heavily twisted and most of the grammatical rules have been abandoned. There’s quite a bit of classical Hebrew and English in there too, probably some Russian, Slovak and Polish as well. It’s where it came from. And now, where Yiddish has ended up, it has given back: chutzpah, shlep, refusenik, nosh, etc. - all essential Yinglish.

As I said, the dialects vary heavily from region to region. My father’s mother says “nit” instead of “nisht”, something that has my mother recoiling in disgust. Still, either works. You can chop and change as much as you like, throw bits of your native language in when it works, etc. Sure, people do this with other second languages, but in this case it’s a core philosophy of the language.

In other words: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Or, as Perl hackers often say, TMTOWTDI.

I’m not making this up.

The Nepalese army and the country’s rampant Maoist rebels are vying for control of the multi-million-pound trade in an exotic traditional medicine known as the Himalayan Viagra. Prized for its reputed powers as an aphrodisiac and panacea, the medicine is made from a creature known to locals as yarchagumba, a caterpillar with a parasitical mushroom that grows from its head and will ultimately kill it.

a.k.a. cordyceps

I’m reminded of the Megaloponera foetens.

On occasion one of these ants, while looking for food is infected by inhaling a microscopic spore from a fungus of the genus Tomentella. After being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The Ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.

Driven on by the growth of the fungus, the ant embarks on a long and exhaustive climb. Completely spent and having reached a prescribed height, the ant impales the plant with its mandibles. Thus affixed, the ant waits to die. Ants that have met their ends in this fashion are quite common in some sections of the forest.

The fungus continues to consume first the nerve cells and finally all the soft tissue that remains of the ant. After approximately two weeks a spike appears from what had been the head of the ant. This spike is about an inch and a half in length and has a bright orange tip heavy with spores which rain down onto the rain forest floor for other unsuspecting ants to inhale.

N.B. If you go looking for the Megaloponera foetens, you’ll find that the information all seems to trace back to a single source, the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

(First link via Discordian Research Technology News)

One of my favorite web resources, Bug Me Not (even better with Firefox and its BugMeNot extension), has instituted a new registration policy.

To help us create a “better online experience” for our visitors we require certain types of users to register.

If you are an employee, partner, affiliate or legal representative of any site which enforces compulsory user registration than we require you to complete our registration process. It costs nothing to register and will only take a moment.

Registration must be completed prior to using any resource of bugmenot.com including viewing pages or emailing the site operators. Failure to do so constitutes a breach of our Terms of Use and non-authorization to use this site. Our server logs don’t lie. […]

What percentage of sites do you visit that require registration?

What percentage would you be comfortable with?

Do you completely trust your personal information to all these sites?

How do you determine what sites to trust and not to trust?

Do you consider privacy a commodity?

If so, what worth (in US dollars) would you place on your own privacy:

Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?

What if we told you that you couldn’t access news unless you agreed?

Explain how we can verify the information you enter in this form is correct:

Explain how a search engine like Google would function if no content was publicly accessible:

[I saved this entry a month ago and apparently accidentally never posted it.]

(Via Boing Boing)

Well, once again, I’m not actually going to make Worldcon. I have a membership to sell. Since it worked out so well last year, I’m going to take a shot at selling it here first.

Full convention rate is now 200 smackers (that’s U.S. smackers.) I’ll let it go for $150 (voting rights not included — it’s much too late for the Hugos anyway.)

Since it’s so close to the con, I’ll fax in the transfer form (and I’ll fax you a copy, too.) I’ll have to do it before you could mail me anything, so if I don’t know you, I’ll probably ask you to paypal me the money.

Any takers?

Illegal Primes:

What folks often forget is a program (any file actually) is a string of bits (binary digits)—so every program is a number. Some of these are prime. Phil Carmody found this [particular prime number] in March 2001. When written in base 16 (hexidecimal), this prime forms a gzip file of the original C-source code (sans tables) that decrypts the DVD Movie encryption scheme (DeCSS). […] It is apparantly illegal to distribute this source code in the United States, so does that make this number (found by Phil Carmody) also illegal?

Monolith:

The software project, called Monolith, takes two digital files and XOR’s them (what the author refers to as “munging”), creating a third file. The author calls the two input files “element” and “basis.” I think many people might call them “plaintext” and “key.” The output file (aka the “monolith” file) would be called the “cryptotext.”

The conceit of the concept is that neither the cryptotext nor the key is copyrighted. Thus, it should be legal to distribute both. Otherwise, the author of Monolith claims, everything is copyrighted and nothing can be distributed because there is always a number such that, if XOR’d with another number, will produce a copyrighted work.

What do soldiers under fire and bullied workers have in common?

Not much, you may think. However research from a leading psychologist suggests that bullied workers go through the very same emotions and stresses as battle-scarred troopers.

I had written some commentary on this, but searched my archives and found I was repeating myself. I guess that’s what happens when you’re at this for two and a half years…