A quick synopsis of <I>Atlas Shrugged</I> - The Boston Diaries

Tuesday, October 23, 2001

A quick synopsis of Atlas Shrugged

Someone on a mailing list I'm on asked for a synopsis of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Since I had read it (a few years ago) and no one else had yet written one, I decided to jump in and provide it. So, here for your reading enjoyment is my quick synopsis.

“Who is John Galt?”

“I dunno.”

“Oh Dagny!”

“Oh Hank!”

“Isn't unbridled capitalism and selfishness grand?”

“And aren't socalists, communists, Kantian philosophers and Shakespearean actors the epitomy of evil?”

“Oh Dagny! I want you to have my hot new metal for your railroad!”

“Oh Hank! I want your hot new metal. Give it to me! But first, let me expose my shoulders.”

“Who is John Galt?”

“I still don't know.”

“Oh Francisco, why did you let them nationalize your copper mines? You Socialist turncoat! Hank needs your copper for his hot new metal!”

“Oh Dagny, I did it to show how evil it is for government to nationalize industries. Don't you understand? Joh—Someone told me that it was in my best interest to let them see the folly of their ways.”

“I don't fully understand, but I still like you.”

“Care to expose your shoulders to me?”

“I like you, but not that much.”

“Who is John Galt, Dagny?”

“He was an engineer for a company, who, with his incredibly rational and objective mind, made a perpetual engine machine but his company went socialistic so he left taking his idea with him, and dropped out of society, Hank.”

“My God! He was a God!”

“I must find him!”

“Care to expose your shoulders to me?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“Oh woe is me! Francisco disappeared! Hank disappeared! What else can go wrong?”

“Hi. I'm from the government. I'm here to nationalize your railroad.”

“Over my dead body.”

“Give up!”

“Never! I think I'll go look for Franscisco and Hank!”

“What happened?”

“Your plane crashed in the middle of the Rockies, Dagny.”

“Where am I?”

“A capitalists wet dream of a utopia. I didn't save you because I'm altrusitic. The price you have to pay is to bare your shoulders to me.”

“Who are you?”

“John Galt.”

“Oh God, I'm having an orgasm! Of course I'll bare my shoulders to you.”

“The country is in ruins! What ever shall we do?”

“Let's nationalize everything that hasn't been nationalized and go on television to tell people it's for their own good.”

“But we can't! Someone took over all television transmissions!”

“Hi. This is John Galt. Communism is bad. Socialism is bad. Kant is eeeeevil. So was Shakespeare. Greed is good. Altruism is bad. So is charity … ”

Five hundred thousand hours later …

“This is John Galt, signing off.”

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

“Isn't it wonderful? I showed the world how bad communism, socialism, Kantian philophies and Shakespearean plays are. Now the world as we knew it is dead! We can leave our Utopia and take over the world, Dagny!”

“Oh God, I'm having a orgasm! Here John, let me bare my shoulders to you.”

Good news is no news at all

I've long given up reading, listening and watching the news; it's just too depressing and makes me want to crawl up into a hole to avoid the nasty horrible world that we live in.

Okay, so it's a form of “poking my head in the sand” response, but it keeps me sane and happy, instead of psychotic and depressed.

So now it seems I should stop reading Slashdot. Between the DMCA forcing Alan Cox to censor the Linux Kernel changelog, Microsoft calling viruii “Industrial Terrorism” (no doubt using the September 11^th attacks for publicity), the FBI wanting to see every packet, any article about the SSSCA, and unreasonable searches when going to and from work I'm afraid to say anything, much less step outside the door of the condo here.

Whatever happened to “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”? Or does this mean I should pull my head out of the sand?

The Bluescreen of Bliss

I'm reading CamWorld and I come across a link about Microsoft's new default background screen. The author of the piece claims it looks like the set from the Teletubbies, but I think it looks more like the set for the movie Toys.

But in any case, what exactly is Microsoft trying to say here? Their customers should be treated as children? That their operating system is nothing more than a toy? Come on, what could they be thinking?

Scientists drink beer to solve problem

The phenomenon of beer turning skunky after exposure to light has been reported in the literature for more than 100 years, Forbes notes, but only now have scientists pinpointed the underlying mechanism. Using a type of spectroscopy that exploits electron spin, the researchers compiled a computer simulation of the reaction by which light-sensitive molecules in hops degrade into unpleasant-smelling products.

Via techdirt, Chemists Determine Cause of ‘Skunky’ Beer

I don't drink beer (I don't really care for the taste, stinky or not) but a few friends of mine do drink it, so I'm passing it along.

Limited, sure. Compared to the age of the Universe …

Finally, the case of Dmitri Sklyrov is perhaps the most appalling of all. Among its other problems, the DMCA has taken what has traditionally been a civil matter (copyright issues) and criminalized certain actions. Dmitri Sklyrov wrote a program that removes protections from Adobe e-books, restoring traditional fair-use rights to e-book owners. Furthermore, he wrote this program in Russia, where it is not illegal. His company (and I don't believe there are any claims that he did this personally) distributed his unlocking software from a U.S. website, and on the basis of this Sklyrov was arrested when he made a trip to the U.S. Sklyrov has actually spent time in jail on these extremely flimsy grounds, and faces a criminal prosecution in the matter. Despite the fact that Adobe has subsequently said it doesn't wish for Sklyarov to be prosecuted, the government is continuing in its case. This is apparently the reward that the government gives for people who stand up for their fair use rights under copyright law, and is the primary reason I'm remaining anonymous.

Interesting Rant on Copyrights Along with MS DRM Crack

Aside from the rant (which should be read) this issue brings up an interesting way to do an end run around the Constitution. I'm sure the Founding Fathers had no idea that corporations could get so powerful but well, they have and it does suck.

Thursday, October 23, 2003

Localization through Internationalization (or l10n via i18n)

I just now cleaned up the last bit of code that required me to maintain multiple copies of mod_blog, depending upon the user. The problem revolved around the month of December and how I feel about it.

Last year around this time I added the following to mod_blog:

if (day.tm_mon == 11)
{
  char dayname[BUFSIZ];

  strftime(dayname,BUFSIZ,"%A",&day);
  fprintf(
           fpout,
           "%s, Debtember %02d, %d",
           dayname,
           day.tm_mday,
           day.tm_year + 1900
         );
  return;
}

If you look closely, you'll notice that I render a date like “Wednesday, December 04, 2002” as “Wednesday, Debtember 04, 2002” as a personal protest to the extreme messages of mass consumerism consumption we are bombarded with during that month.

Although the other user (Hi, Mark!) didn't like that feature, so it was a simple matter of making that code conditional and I did it at compile time, not run time (as a matter of personal preference on my part) but in retrospect, it would have been easier to make it a runtime option, but one that I was relunctant to do since it was so specific.

But over the year it meant I had to compile the program twice—once for me, once for Mark (there was another aspect that was different between my version and Mark's that was amplified when Gregory decided to use mod_blog but that aspect as since been fixed) which gets to be a pain. And yet I still resisted making this a runtime decision.

I could have made this a general feature, the ability to specify alternative names for months, but then why stop there? Why not the days of the week? But what galls me is that adding such features mean I have to forego using strftime() to format the dates (well, not that there aren't problems with the routines in time.h already) and duplicate pretty much what I'm already using.

It was today when I figured out a solution. It may not be the best solution but it does mean I can rip out the above code, meaning I only have to compile once, and I can still use strftime() to format the date, and I can have Debtember, and Mark (and Gregory) can have December.

Locales.

Like I said, it may not be the best of solutions, but it does work.

ANSI-C has the concept of a “locale” which specifies such details of output as the currency symbol, decimal point, number group separators as well as the names of the weekdays and months. Usually this defaults to the C or POSIX locale (which is another word for US hegemony on the computing world) but it can be changed with setlocale()—all that remains is to figure out how to create a new locale for my own use.

There isn't much information about doing this, but I was able to munge my way through. Under Linux (at least Gentoo and RedHat from what I can tell), it meant creating a file under /usr/share/i18n/locales (I created one called en_SPC for ENglish, SPC variant with “Debtember”) and then doing localedef -i en_SPC en_SPC to actually add it to the system.

So I did have to add an option to the configuration file, but now it specifies the locale to use, which, generally speaking, is a better hack than what I had before.

Monday, October 23, 2006

A visit to Isengard

Make you the world a bit better or more beautiful because you have lived in it.

Edward W. Bok

I was worried about the weather this morning, afraid it might rain and ruin the plans I had for our destination was an outdoor destination. But the weather cleared up enough not to rain and it made the day an enjoyably cool one.

And our destination?

The Historic Bok Sanctuary which houses one of the largest musical instruments I've ever seen, the carillon (basically, a large tower with bells—this one has 60 bells of various sizes which are played via a specialized keyboard).

[Cutaway view of the tower—the bells are at the top]

The grounds around the tower are a conservatory and are well maintained, lending themselves to the serene feeling one gets when walking around the site.

[But let's not forget the spooky trees!]

But I picked the destination simply because of the tower. As a kid I came across photographs of the place my maternal grandfather had taken, and I was always intrigued by the place and have been wanting to visit the place for years. When I decided to take a trip I knew just the place—Bok Tower.

[Of course it's pink! This is Florida after all!]

What was disappointing was the music. I mean, we're talking 60 bells of various sizes, but whether it was the fact that it was 60 bells, or the player of the carillon still learning to play the instrument, the music just didn't do anything for me.

[That's a brass door, not a gold door, but it's still impressive]

I would have liked to have stayed a bit longer and soaked in the environment a bit more, but The Kids … they got hungry.

Yeehaw! We're at a junction!

For the trip back home, I decided we'd take State-60 east (even though the scariest drive of my life had been along State-60, but that was at 1:00 am with 50′ visibility and a semitruck doing 100mph right behind me—that was then, this is now, in the middle of a sunny day) and at Yeehaw Junction take US-441 south all the way back home.

[Steven Spielberg must have been inspired by this truck for his film “Duel”]

For such a small one building town it sure was noisy with all the truck traffic passing through.

Now, before the trip, I was told that US-27 was a very dangerous route to take, but I found State-60 and US-441 to be way more frightening than US-27 ever was on this trip (maybe because US-27 was two lanes each way the entire trip, whereas State-60/US-441 were two lanes total through this part of the state).

As we were driving home, the weather off towards the south east looked rather ominous, although the threatening rain never did materialize.

Now, for this trip, I borrowed Smirk's digital video camera and took about an hours worth of footage over the past two days.

[Me directing the video—photo by Spring Dew]

The intent is to edit the raw footage into a video blog entry that (hopefully) will be coherent and amusing. We shall see.

Not quite in the nick of time

Congratulations!

You are now the proud owner of a genuine Tucows Squishy Cow.

I'm sorry it took such a long time to get to you—I announced the Squishy Cow giveaway right as our stock of Squishy Cows went bone dry. Thanks for being so patient!

Your Squishy Cow should provide years of entertainment not only as a desk accessory, but also as an amusing prop in your photographs and home videos.

Remember, if you post Squishy Cow photos on Flickr, please give them a tag of SquishyCow or SquishyCows so everyone can find them!

Enjoy your cow!

Joey deVilla
Technical Evangelist / Squishy Cow Wrangler
Tucows
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Way back in July I'm reading The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21^st Century when I see this entry on getting an official Tucows Squishy Cow and all I have to do is take photos with the Squishy Cow in interesting places in Florida.

So I sign up.

And wait.

And eventually forget about the whole thing.

But what should I find waiting for me when I finally get home?

My Official Tucows Squishy Cow.

Had it arrived but two days earlier I would have taken it with me to Bok Tower.

Heck, I could have taken photos of it next to real Holstein cows.

Sigh.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Premature optimization

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Knuth, Literate Programming, 1992, p28.

Nobody wants to argue with Knuth—it is the equivalent of arguing against the second law of thermodynamics. However, the problem here is that too often people misunderstand what Knuth was getting at.

Mature Optimization

I often feel as if the industry has gone off into collective insanity because of Knuth's quote, that concerns for programming efficiency are brushed aside because, well, optimization is eeeeeeeeeevil, people! Eeeeeeevil! (And if you really want to go down this rabbit hole, writing code is a form of premature optimization, because it's already been written. Even figuring out the problem is a form of premature optimization since someone already solved it.)

But the article points out that Knuth has been misquoted. Or rather, selectively quoted. The full quote from Knuth's book Literate Programming:

The improvement in speed from Example 2 to Example 2a is only about 12%, and many people would pronounce that insignificant. The conventional wisdom shared by many of today's software engineers calls for ignoring efficiency in the small; but I believe this is simply an overreaction to the abuses they see being practiced by penny-wise-and-pound-foolish programmers, who can't debug or maintain their “optimized” programs. In established engineering disciplines a 12% improvement, easily obtained, is never considered marginal; and I believe the same viewpoint should prevail in software engineering. Of course I wouldn't bother making such optimizations on a one-shot job, but when it's a question of preparing quality programs, I don't want to restrict myself to tools that deny me such efficiencies.

There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code, but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail.

Knuth, Literate Programming, 1992, p28.

Another article to read about this: The Fallacy of Premature Optimization.

Friends don't let friends code C++

As if the errno fiasco in C wasn't bad enough, not only does C++ inherit that mess, but it comes barreling down the road with a mess of more problems.

Sheesh.

Glad I'm not forced to use C++.

Friday, October 23, 2009

WikiMUD Part Deux: Five Years Later …

From
Giles Cooper <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To
sean@conman.org
Subject
WikiMUD
Date
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:03:24 -0400
… (almost exactly five years later) …
Go on, I'm entrigued
–
Giles Cooper
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
http://planes09.wikia.com/

Giles is refering to two entries I wrote five years ago. It was more of a passing idea than anything I really wanted to work on and over the years I felt that the most likely language to implement the WikiMUD would be JavaScript (as it's pretty much Lisp in imperative form … kind of … if you squint real hard … and wave your hands around a lot), but over the past month or so, I'm thinking Lua would be a good candidate as well.

Especially given that I can now write network services in Lua.

Okay, doesn't mean I'll actually write a WikiMUD … just that now I'm in a better position to start, if I decide to.

Or someone can …

Or something …

I'm sensing a trend …

In June, Al Byrd's three-bedroom home, built by his father on the western outskirts of Atlanta, was mistakenly torn down by a demolition company. “I said, ‘Don't you have an address?’ ” a distraught Byrd later recounted. “He said, ‘Yes, my GPS coordinates led me right to this address here.’ ” The incident joined a long list of satellite-guided blunders, including one last year in which a driver in Bedford Hills, New York, obeyed instructions from his GPS to turn right onto a set of train tracks, where he got stuck and had to abandon his car to a collision with a commuter train. Incredibly, the same thing happened to someone else at exactly the same intersection nine months later. In Europe, narrow village roads and country lanes have turned into deadly traps for truckers blindly following GPS instructions, and an insurance company survey found that 300,000 British drivers have either crashed or nearly crashed because of the systems.

…

To many, the beauty of the devices is precisely that we no longer have any need to painstakingly assemble those cognitive maps. But Cornell University human-computer interaction researcher Gilly Leshed argues that knowledge of an area means more than just finding your way around. Navigation underlies the transformation of an abstract “space” to a “place” that has meaning and value to an individual. For the GPS users Leshed and her colleagues observed in an ethnographic study, the virtual world on the screens of their devices seemed to blur and sometimes take over from the real world that whizzed by outside. “Instead of experiencing physical locations, you end up with a more abstract representation of the world,” she says.

On a snowmobile trip of over 500 kilometres across the Arctic, this blurring of the real and the virtual became obvious to Carleton University anthropologist Claudio Aporta. Returning from Repulse Bay to Igloolik, a village west of Baffin Island where he was conducting fieldwork, he and an Inuit hunter became engulfed in fog. The hunter had been leading the way along traditional routes, guided by the winds, water currents, animal behaviour, and features such as the uqalurait, snowdrifts shaped by prevailing winds from the west by northwest. Like London taxi drivers, Inuit hunters spend years acquiring the knowledge needed to find their way in their environment, part of a culture in which “the idea of being lost or unable to find one's way is without basis in experience, language, or understanding — that is, until recently,” as Aporta and Eric Higgs wrote in a 2005 paper on “satellite culture” and the rise of GPS use in Igloolik.

Heavy fog is the one condition that stymies even the most expert Inuit navigators. The traditional response is to wait until the fog lifts, but, knowing that Aporta had mapped the outbound journey on his GPS, his guide asked him to lead the way on his snowmobile. “It was an incredible experience, because I could see absolutely nothing,” he recalls. “I didn't know if there was a cliff ahead; I was just following the GPS track for five kilometres, blind, really.” This was the extreme version of the city driver blankly turning left and right at the command of his GPS, and it required a leap of faith. “Believe me,” he says, chuckling, “I was sweating like crazy.”

The demonstrable benefits of GPS have, however, removed much of the incentive for the younger generation in Igloolik to undertake the arduous process of learning traditional navigation techniques. Elders worry about this loss of knowledge, for reasons that go beyond the cultural—a straight line across an empty icefield plotted by GPS doesn't warn about the thin ice traditional trails would have skirted. Dead batteries and frozen screens, both common occurrences in the harsh Arctic conditions, would also be disastrous for anyone guided solely by technology.

Via Hacker News, The Walrus Magazine » Global Impositioning Systems

I think there's a connection between overreliance on the GPS and my unease with the Drupal User's Group yesterday, but it's still a bit tenuous … but there is a connection …

And one story somewhat related to the article: when I visited my friends in Boston, I had no sense of the city (other than being a twisty maze of one way streets, all alike) because we always took the T, which was for the most part, below ground. We'd descend into an underground station, enter a train, wait a bit, exit the train and ascend into a new part of the city—a linear stretch of Bostonian islands as it were.

I found it rather disconcerting, but I never did get lost.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

A lazy Sunday

[The following entries are being written a month after the fact. I have no excuse, other than laziness and a severe case of procrastination; story of my life. So, without further ado … ]

It was a lazy-hazy Sunday today. We had lunch with Kay, Dale, Joshua and Ethan at a local diner, where good food and good conversation followed. Kay mentioned that we should head out to the Yates Cider Mill, but that they wouldn't be able to join us.

I wanted nothing more than a nap. Bunny was intent on going to the cider mill. We compromised—I'd take a nap at the hotel, and Bunny would go to the cider mill.

I'm not sure who go the better deal in the end. I got a nice four hour nap. Bunny got the best apple cider, ever, but had to fight traffic, an hour long wait for the bathroom, and thousands of people, all fighting for the best apple cider, ever.

It's probably a wash.

For dinner, we met with Jan and Ed for dinner. Again, good food, good conversation, but it ended all too soon.

Friday, October 23, 2015

I, for one, will welcome our new AI overlords

Earlier this year, I was driving in a northern Michigan snowstorm headed to Detroit airport. I was worried that, given the storm, my flight might be delayed. Thusly, I grabbed my phone and without knowing if it would work I said to it:

"OK GOOGLE, what is the status of my flight today?"

Within seconds, Googlebot (or maybe it was Larry Page - not sure) responded:

"Flight XYZ from Detroit, Michigan to San Francisco, California is scheduled to leave on-time at 2:30pm".

Pretty cool huh? If you were like me, you're sort of thinking that was cool but big deal, it should do that. OF COURSE it should do that - I could have done that (had I not been driving). After a lot more thinking about it however, I'd like to point out that boy are we a snot-nosed, ungrateful species who take amazing things for granted.

A stunning array of technologies just came together to make that happen. So much so I'm convinced I could write a full length blog article just listing them. In the name of sticking to the topic (i.e. complete human destruction caused by the emergence of AI) let's take for granted the everyday sorcery of talking to thousands of computers around the world, I'll just focus on the “artificial intelligence” parts. (Where “intelligence” may have a fuzzy definition).

Simply: I spoke to my tiny hand-held computer in English. It heard me start with "Ok Google" to know I was addressing it. It then parsed the rest of my words and realized I had asked a question (it likely offloaded that work to a remote computer). It is also able to recognize the voice of millions of others speaking in accents and dialects. I could have likely phrased that question many ways and it still would have worked. It parsed my question and understood I was asking about a flight. It then scanned my Gmail to find my flight reservation I had made months before. From that it examined the outbound and return flight and realized the outbound had already happened.

It might have realized my current location was in Michigan near(ish) the Detroit airport further understanding I was asking about my return flight. It then hit some real-time flight database to know if the flight was still on time. It might have checked Detroit Airport in general for delays to decide if it should respond in a qualified manner. It then formulated a perfect English sentence, maybe with considerations of how I formulated my sentence, computer generated the audio in a human voice, and played it aloud for me.

Go ahead, be not impressed - I dare you. Clichés be damned. We truly live in amazing times.

So that's now. What's coming next? How about:

"OK Google, what's the probability my flight will crash today?"

Via Lobsters, Paul Tyma: How Artificial Intelligence Will Really Kill Us All

The good news? That Paul Tyma doesn't think we'll face the Terminator Scenario.

The bad news? It's much, much worse.

Monday, October 23, 2023

One of the rarest gas stations in the United States

One of the YouTube channels I watch is Phil Edwards, and on October 10^th, I managed to catch his request for help—he wanted people local to a dozen cities to provide some phone video. I noticed that one of the cities mentioned was Lake Worth Beach, Florida. I once lived in Lake Worth, Florida—could it be near there?

Turns out, Lake Worth is Lake Worth Beach, having changed its name in 2019 in order to rebrand itself. And while Lake Worth Beach (and I don't think I'll ever get used to that name) is a bit north of Chez Boca, it isn't that far to drive. I felt it would be interesting to see what project Phil Edwards has in mind, so I signed up.

The project involved video of a gas station, and not just any gas station, but one of a dozen stations still branded with Standard Oil (which are now owned by Chevron Corporation).

On the 12^th, I drove to Lake Worth Beach and videoed the only Standard gas station in Florida. As stations go, it wasn't that special. It didn't have a distinctive architetural style, nor did it look all that old. It looked like every other Chevron gas station, except for the “Standard” label that most people probably just ignore. Heck, I lived just a few miles down the roat from this station and I never knew it was a Standard gas station, that's how unremarkable it is.

I'm only mentioning this now as Phil's video on Standard gas stations is now up on YouTube. The footage I supplied can be seen at the 2:35 mark (all four seconds of it).

So I guess that means I can add “videographer” to my résumé now.

Woot!

I'm getting some serious “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” vibes from this card magic book

“The book I ordered for you came in,” said Bunny, walking into the Computer Room and handing me a slim volume—Scott Kahn's Kahnjuring: Deceptive Practices With Playing Cards. She had ordered it about a week prior after we saw him on Penn & Teller's “Fool Us” (spoiler: he failed to fool them, but it's still a very cool card swap with transparent cards). “How soon until I see some tricks?”

I took the book and quickly read through the first trick. And … well …

When ready to perform, start with a convincing full deck false shuffle. Since this routine requires a table, I usually will use a Push Through Shuffle followed by an Up The Ladder False Cut. However, I have also used Bob King's variation of the Erdnase Blind Overhand Shuffle that was published in Darwin Oritz's The Annotated Erdnase, 1991. The spectator may even give the deck a straight cut, if desired, before proceeding.

Ribbon Spread the cards across the performing surface and ask the spectator to touch a card of their choosing. Outjog the selected card for half its length …

Kahnjuring, page 17

“Um … not any time soon,” I said. I just recently learned about the Push Through Shuffle, but the Up The Ladder False Cut? Erdnase Blind Overhand Shuffle?

I don't think this book is an introduction to card magic.

It's still neat, though, and the second trick in the book is the trick Scott Kahn did on “Fool Us,” so it's nice to learn how that particular trick is done, even if I didn't understand all the jargon.

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