LONDON (Reuters)
Read that news bulletin. Read every word of it. I'll summarize in a moment, but don't rely on my summary. Don't ever rely on any summary. Don't trust what Moses said; get it from God. (And don't trust God either: who know what he's hiding.) Get the raw evidence.
English hacker sees War Games. (I saw that movie with bk, himself a hacker.) Kid hacks into the Pentagon. His hack winds up saving the world from the berserk computer. Now this contemporary hacker goes looking for UFOs, government cover-ups: a truth seeker, a weird pervert of a truth seeker: just what we could use a few more of.
But shame on us if this is news to any of us. Richard Feynman, genius extraordinaire, computer for the Manhattan Project, found US security to be as much hole as wall and told us all about it in the years following WW II. Did we listen? Of course not. No, we're too busy being the big cheese to imagine that what was wrong with Rome applies to us.
Richard Feynman, math whizz, funny-man, had full clearance throughout the military: it was his secrets we were keeping after all. Being involved in security, he started studying security: Houdini, safes, lock picking ...
The Pentagon spent top dollar on the best safes: then never bothered to read or follow the instructions that came with the safe. Feynman went around the Pentagon trying the default combination on unattended (!) safes. Most opened to the factory installed combination! If they didn't, he tried variants of the safe's assignee's birthday. Bingo, again and again. Or he dialed in π, or e ... The Pentagon officials were no better than ordinary citizens at their own security. Where unusual combinations were used, the combination was written out on the desk, where any spy could find it in a minute.
Feynman studied the safes. He discovered that the combination could be de-cyphered by looking at the tumblers. The tumblers were visible only when the door was open. Thus, the safe, with a secure combination added by the user, kept with its doors closed, was safe: worth the investment. But Pentagon offices kept the safe doors wide open, from 9 to 5! Any spy could learn the safe's combination simply by walking by. Feynman wrote memos to all concerned. What happened? The secretaries still kept the safe doors open, but if they saw Feynman coming, they would close the door; not the safe door, the office door! So Feynman wouldn't catch them giving the store away. The spies could read the secrets, but the watch dog wouldn't see.
Now this English nerd follows a movie! buys off-the-shelf software, a cheap hacker's guide ... and waltzes right into the Pentagon, NASA ... Instead of saying Thank you, Mr. Feynman, thank you Houdini, thank you, Mr. Whistle ... we want to crucify him, eat his gristle.
god gives us the materials to live, and the materials to snuff ourselves. We live. Then we get rich, powerful, lazy, drunk, stoned. We pass out, with our pants down, our jewels exposed. Why should anyone care what happens to us?
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Standard Time
Sri Lanka wants to mess with its clock. Arthur C. Clarke is appalled, arguing for the world standard. Sri Lanka has already messed with its clock since Standard Time was invented and implemented politically, now it want's to mess again.
Political time is a lot less screwy than political calendars thanks to clocks being a far more recent invention than calendars. The universe is the universe: our descriptions of it, our ideas about it, our prescriptions for societies ... are something else again. My Sentiens: Stage Sense is one place at
where I discuss the arbitrary political nature of Standard Time as distinct from the natural time that Prigogine assumes is infinite and predates the universe. I'll now discuss it again in the context of Social Epistemology / Reality / Time, repeating as appropriate. (Calendars too need more than a few words, but there's already a fabulous web site on the subject: I'll add the URL when I find it.)
First, there was time. We have evidence that men were recording lunar cycles by eighteen thousand years ago. Calendars developed. Much later, somebody came up with the sun dial: worked in good daylight only. Only recently have there been mechanical clocks. Only very recently has there been Standard Time: and standards require not only culture but politics: some authority sets the clock.
Prior to the telegraph "noon" was when you perceived the sun to be "overhead." The sun is actually wherever it is. The spinning earth revolves around it, at an angle. Thus, noon moves around the earth each "day." Noon, day ... these are concepts of local perspective. If we were orbiting Jupiter noon on earth would make little sense unless we were in contact with some specific earthling in some specific location: Greenwich, New York, Tokyo ... If I'm standing in a field in the Catskills, on the phone with somebody in another county or another state, we'll have very different noons. If our measurements could be precise enough, my noon on this side of the street wouldn't match your noon on that side of the street. With enough precision, we could be standing next to each other and not have the same noon.
Before the telegraph no one worried about that. With the telegraph, and the time stamping of messages, a guy in Brooklyn wires a guy in Hoboken. They seem to be "talking" at the "same" time, but the guy in Brooklyn time stamps his version of the message a few minutes before the guy in Hoboken's time. In step the politicians, and we have Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time, etc. We pretend that it's noon at the same instant everywhere in the time zone, we pretend that Chicago is an hour earlier.
Just remember: in my house I can set my clock to any "hour" I want. It's my clock. And if the clock breaks, the hour is set at whatever position it was in when it broke: unless I move it manually. The missionary gives the clock to the cannibal chief. In Eco's illustration, the chief wears it as a necklace, the missionary has no idea what it means to him.
Meanwhile, real time is real time: infinite: unknowable.
Political time is a lot less screwy than political calendars thanks to clocks being a far more recent invention than calendars. The universe is the universe: our descriptions of it, our ideas about it, our prescriptions for societies ... are something else again. My Sentiens: Stage Sense is one place at
where I discuss the arbitrary political nature of Standard Time as distinct from the natural time that Prigogine assumes is infinite and predates the universe. I'll now discuss it again in the context of Social Epistemology / Reality / Time, repeating as appropriate. (Calendars too need more than a few words, but there's already a fabulous web site on the subject: I'll add the URL when I find it.)First, there was time. We have evidence that men were recording lunar cycles by eighteen thousand years ago. Calendars developed. Much later, somebody came up with the sun dial: worked in good daylight only. Only recently have there been mechanical clocks. Only very recently has there been Standard Time: and standards require not only culture but politics: some authority sets the clock.
Prior to the telegraph "noon" was when you perceived the sun to be "overhead." The sun is actually wherever it is. The spinning earth revolves around it, at an angle. Thus, noon moves around the earth each "day." Noon, day ... these are concepts of local perspective. If we were orbiting Jupiter noon on earth would make little sense unless we were in contact with some specific earthling in some specific location: Greenwich, New York, Tokyo ... If I'm standing in a field in the Catskills, on the phone with somebody in another county or another state, we'll have very different noons. If our measurements could be precise enough, my noon on this side of the street wouldn't match your noon on that side of the street. With enough precision, we could be standing next to each other and not have the same noon.
Before the telegraph no one worried about that. With the telegraph, and the time stamping of messages, a guy in Brooklyn wires a guy in Hoboken. They seem to be "talking" at the "same" time, but the guy in Brooklyn time stamps his version of the message a few minutes before the guy in Hoboken's time. In step the politicians, and we have Greenwich Mean Time, Eastern Standard Time, etc. We pretend that it's noon at the same instant everywhere in the time zone, we pretend that Chicago is an hour earlier.
Just remember: in my house I can set my clock to any "hour" I want. It's my clock. And if the clock breaks, the hour is set at whatever position it was in when it broke: unless I move it manually. The missionary gives the clock to the cannibal chief. In Eco's illustration, the chief wears it as a necklace, the missionary has no idea what it means to him.
Meanwhile, real time is real time: infinite: unknowable.
Memory
A bigger more complex brain extends memory. The Homo sapiens mother recognizes one twin from the other, the 'gator mom, the ostrich mom, just has a bunch of little gator/ostriches behind her: switch in her neighbors', she won't know. or care.
Then we develop speech, then writing. Now we know precisely what was published as Twain, imprecisely what Shakespeare wrote (though precisely what was published AS Shakespeare), precisely what was published as Jesus, very imprecisely what Jesus might actually have said. And nothing at all of what Eve might have said 150,000 years ago. (But we sure know precisely, just recently, how her genes were different!)
I can know exactly, typos and all, what I emailed my son under my current MacMail. I have a clear memory of what I wrote to Ivan Illich in 1970, but no carbon. I remember, but more fuzzily, what my mother said to my grandfather after his cancer when I was a kid.
Once upon a time we knew what our mother looked like now and also had a fuzzy memory of how she looked when we were an infant. Then comes photography. Most people's snaps are brown and yellow and then nonexistent within a few years. Suddenly, at the museum, there's a good print from Lewis Carroll! Victorian!
Guy like me has a clear memory, photo assisted, of periods going back to the mid-19th C. I "remember" Carroll, Brady, Lartigue,
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Boulougne
Cartier-Bresson ... Melies, Lillian Gish, Chaplin, WC Fields ... My actual life I remember more in the fuzzy style common to all moderns: some photos etc, but we sure don't know that many of them.
I have my own memories of Burt Lancaster, like my memories of my mother. Then there are the films-photos themselves. I artificially remember Burt when he was young, did trapeze work. My memory of Atlantic City, Burt old, is clear.
Now for the first time I watch Local Hero, 1983. Burt is old. Fine: I'd know him anywhere, any age. But then there's this twerp in the movie. Good god, it's that guy from Animal House!
Suddenly I have a "clear" memory of Animal House with this twerpy kid. I look him up at IMDb (Peter Riegert) . He's old! He did a million movies I didn't see! He grew old without me! He lived with Bette Midler and I didn't know.
What insanity to mix clear with fuzz, verifiable documents with unverifiable documents ...
Then again I bet a worm has some sort of impressions: some clear, some fuzzy, some verifiable, some just ghosts.
Then we develop speech, then writing. Now we know precisely what was published as Twain, imprecisely what Shakespeare wrote (though precisely what was published AS Shakespeare), precisely what was published as Jesus, very imprecisely what Jesus might actually have said. And nothing at all of what Eve might have said 150,000 years ago. (But we sure know precisely, just recently, how her genes were different!)
I can know exactly, typos and all, what I emailed my son under my current MacMail. I have a clear memory of what I wrote to Ivan Illich in 1970, but no carbon. I remember, but more fuzzily, what my mother said to my grandfather after his cancer when I was a kid.
Once upon a time we knew what our mother looked like now and also had a fuzzy memory of how she looked when we were an infant. Then comes photography. Most people's snaps are brown and yellow and then nonexistent within a few years. Suddenly, at the museum, there's a good print from Lewis Carroll! Victorian!
Guy like me has a clear memory, photo assisted, of periods going back to the mid-19th C. I "remember" Carroll, Brady, Lartigue,
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Boulougne
Cartier-Bresson ... Melies, Lillian Gish, Chaplin, WC Fields ... My actual life I remember more in the fuzzy style common to all moderns: some photos etc, but we sure don't know that many of them.
I have my own memories of Burt Lancaster, like my memories of my mother. Then there are the films-photos themselves. I artificially remember Burt when he was young, did trapeze work. My memory of Atlantic City, Burt old, is clear.
Now for the first time I watch Local Hero, 1983. Burt is old. Fine: I'd know him anywhere, any age. But then there's this twerp in the movie. Good god, it's that guy from Animal House!
Suddenly I have a "clear" memory of Animal House with this twerpy kid. I look him up at IMDb (Peter Riegert) . He's old! He did a million movies I didn't see! He grew old without me! He lived with Bette Midler and I didn't know.
What insanity to mix clear with fuzz, verifiable documents with unverifiable documents ...
Then again I bet a worm has some sort of impressions: some clear, some fuzzy, some verifiable, some just ghosts.
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