MemeMachineGo!

There’s a local Bay Area murder case that has been getting a lot of press in the open source community, as the defendant is a well known open source developer. Hans Reiser, the creator of ReiserFS, is accused of killing his wife, Nina Reiser. They had been involved in a contentious divorce; she’s been missing since September 3rd. I was struck by the prosecutor’s interpretation of this police testimony:

Officer Gino Guerrero said Hans Reiser engaged in a lengthy cat-and-mouse game with surveillance officers who were trailing him on the evening of Sept. 18, 15 days after Nina Reiser was last seen alive. During a break in Wednesday’s hearing, prosecutor Greg Dolge said Hans Reiser was “avoiding police at all costs” and his behavior is “evidence of a guilty conscience.” […]

Guerrero said officers trailed Hans Reiser, both by car and by airplane, after he left family court at 600 Washington St. in Oakland, which is in the same block as an Oakland police station, late in the afternoon of Sept. 18. According to a probable cause statement in the case, Hans Reiser and a male friend “appeared to be conducting counter surveillance” to avoid police by driving at varying speeds, turning down small quiet residential streets and making abrupt stops.

Guerrero said Hans Reiser and his friend eventually had dinner at Fonda restaurant on Solano Avenue in Albany and afterward the friend, who was driving a silver BMW, dropped Hans Reiser at the corner of San Pablo and Ashby avenues in Berkeley. Guerrero said Hans Reiser walked around the area furtively, stopping occasionally to look in all directions, and eventually got into a 1988 Honda CRX that was parked on Acton Street near Carleton Street. Guerrero said police then followed Hans Reiser as he drove the car to 2425 Monterey Road in Oakland.

So if you’re being followed by the police, doing anything other than cheerfully making it convenient for them is, of itself, evidence of guilt?

In Kaprekar’s operation, one takes a natural number whose individual digits are not all the same, generates two new numbers by sorting the digits in ascending and descending order, subtracts the smaller of these new numbers from the larger, and repeats with that result. For any 4-digit number, this will result in 6174 within 7 steps, and remain there . (Look to the linked article for a longer description, with examples and elaboration.)

But does it mean anything? Or is it just the incidental result of number-twiddling? And can we really quantitatively distinguish the two?

Now that’s a big question.

A usual errand of mine is mailing our mortgage check at the post office near my workplace. Today, when I went to cross it off my to-do list, I found that what I’d written was “mail rent.”

This is a typical error — after three and a half years, I still automatically think of it as the rent check.

(The maintenance, though, I know well that’s all ours. The blessing and curse of Berkeley’s weather — our grass is green, lush and growing even now, in early January… which meant we had to mow, weed and trim even now, in early January.)

A while back, I linked to a Neal Stephenson interview. It was much blogged at the time. I called attention to an interesting discussion of commercial and literary writing; many others called attention to the funniest part.

In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

You don’t have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

I missed it at the time, but, not long after, William Gibson referred to this on his blog.

I would have liked to have gotten him permanently out of the way shortly after reading Snow Crash, of course, but I could already see that I would need him one day to help battle Bruce Sterling. Literature is a long game.

Since getting my Irish citizenship, I’ve been surprised and distressed to find that a lot of Americans think it means UK citizenship. Um, no. There have actually been various troubles involving issues related to the distinction.

This Wikipedia entry on British Isles terminology includes an Euler diagram of the political and physical geography of the British Isles that should help clear things up. Also useful is its directed graph of the history of how we got from the Kingdom of England, the Principality of Wales, the Kingdom of Scotland, and the Lordship of Ireland to the modern-day Republic of Ireland and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the full name of the UK.) And, to no surprise, “British Isles” is, itself, contentious.

What I didn’t know before I researched this entry is the weird status of Guernsey and Jersey (the Channel Islands,) and the Isle of Man. They’re not a part of the UK (and, thus, not a part of the EU,) but Crown Dependencies. The UK is responsible for their defense, but they’re responsible for their own customs and immigration. Each of the three issues its own money and passports, and has its own vehicle registration code and top-level Internet domain. Their citizens are counted as UK citizens for the purposes of UK nationality law, but acts of the UK Parliament don’t apply to them without an Order-in-Council, legislation formally made in the name of the Queen.

The details are much more complicated than all that sounds, and I don’t pretend to have any less superficial understanding of them than I’ve presented here. UK lawyers involved in these jurisdictional issues must have their work cut out for them.

Finally, the adjective for things related to the Isle of Man is “Manx.” Manx cats originated there.

I’m selling a laptop on eBay.

I’ve been meaning to do that for a few weeks. If I get a few more items off my to do list, I might even start posting again.

As computers creep into more and more things, expect to see a lot more of this.

Here’s a cranky debunking of this non-quote:

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganization; and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

— Petronius Arbiter - Greek Navy - 210 BC

Petronius Arbiter was the author of The Satyricon and lived from 27-66.

In My Language is a powerful video by an autistic woman doing what she refers to as speaking her own language, and then commenting on language, thought, and ideas of personhood. This Metafilter thread called my attention to it, and the videographer herself replied.

It’s interesting how many people describe what I do as checking out of reality, or various variants on this. In fact, this has more to do with which parts of reality a person is paying attention to. Somehow it is “reality” to engage in a lot of abstract symbolic thought (and sort of paste that thought on over one’s surroundings and believe oneself to be perceiving them) but “not reality” to engage in interaction more or less directly with one’s surroundings. If you talk to me for awhile you will find me quite a bit more lucid than some people are painting me as. […]

As far as research is concerned, they seem to be finding that non-autistic people filter out large parts of the world around them, imagine a whole lot to fill in the gaps, and are generally unable to stop even when it would be useful to stop. This has its useful points, and I would never deny that. But they are finding that autistic people, while we can and do filter our experiences like that, can drop the filter when necessary to directly perceive things (inasmuch as the human brain can directly perceive things). Much of our understanding of the world (including pretty high-level understanding) is taking place through things like pattern-matching that are often thought to be “mere” perception instead of “real thought”.

I highly recommend watching the video and reading the whole of her follow-up.

Update: the videographer has a blog.

Red pandas (or firefoxes) are pretty much the cutest thing ever. I’m not clear on the details but this Japanese TV show seems to be about a young woman who has to share a small apartment with two red pandas.