Cicadas don't always use prime numbers

They're expecting huge amount of cicadas in America this year - because the 17 year cycle cicadas are due out; they last hatched in 2008. This brood has a particularly large geographic distribution.

Last year, 2024, was also particularly active for cicadas, in North America, because two broods emerged at the same time, 13-year and 17-year broods emerged at the same time.

I think it's interesting that only American cicadas use prime numbers in this way. South African, and other cicadas, emerge most years. We called them 'Christmas Beetles' from the time of year they emerged.

We had beautifully harmonious cicadas most years in our garden in Pietermaritzburg.

Often in mid-January, in the heat, there'd be a number of cicadas in different trees singing at the same time, which created an hypnotic beat-frequency, like a stereo record, seeming to sweep backwards and forwards around the garden.

It was the perfect accompaniment to a soft, hot morning, sometimes punctuated by lawn mowers in the distance, or the sound of water sprayed from a hose.

https://www.citizen.co.za/southlands-sun/news-headlines/local-news/2023/03/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-life-cycle-of-cicadas/

Collaborative Negotiation

 The best training course that I ever attended, when working at Hewlett-Packard, in the 1980s, was a course called 'Collaborative Negotiation'.

It has helped me enormously, over the decades since!

The essence of Collaborative Negotiation is to understand that negotiation is not a 'zero-sum game', where the 'win' of one party comes only at a 'loss' to the other. This is not true, a good negotiation ought to be a win-win collaboration towards the best solution for both parties.

The first step to using Collaborative Negotiation is to understand that everything is a negotiation and everything is negotiable.

The main route to success is for both parties to do their best to understand the motivation, needs, both tangible, and emotional, and use that understanding to find novel, unexpected solutions that meet these needs for all parties.

This requires work, imagination, and emotional intelligence - practicing negotiation every day, whenever the opportunity arises, helps build these skills.

Whenever you are presented with a situation that doesn't seem ideal, realise it is a negotiation and try to understand the position of the person you are working with.

Then you, and the other party, can frame the situation in a way that makes more sense, and, from that, work towards a solution.

The practice of collaboration, and the importance of negotiation is the core of my book Collaborative Consulting: Service Management Scenarios.

If you are interested in having things work out better, but don't feel comfortable bullying others, or tricking them, or using confrontation to get your own way, I strongly recommend the book to you.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collaborative-consulting-service-management-scenarios/dp/0113313918

TikTok ban - and the Tor Browser

There is a move for the US, and, now, US governnents to ban TikTok.

The claim is based on Sinophobia - claiming that it presents some sort of danger that Facebook, X(twitter), Instagram, and other platforms do not have.

This is bogus. All social media platforms 'spy' on users. If that is an issue, the argement could only be to ban all social media.

The actual reason, as is pretty well known, is that TikTok supports free speech. This access to free speech has led to lots of users, quite properly, discussing their horror at the genocide against Palestineans, being carried out by the Apartheid State of Isreal. They hope to suppress this discussion in order to continue their complicty with the war crime of collective punishment, by supplying arms and money to Isreal.

There is a solution, if this ban comes about.

Users of TikTok need to download the Tor browser:

https://www.torproject.org/download/

Then use this browser to create, and use, accounts on TikTok.

This will circumvent the ban, and allow free speech to continue - aiding the humanitarian effort to stop the genocide in Gaza.

Exploring the 'randomness' of /dev/urandom, and xored derivatives

 For quite a lot of cryptography, you need a good source of random numbers, particularly for one-time pads. It's difficult to get fast sources of natural event based numbers, so some sort of compromise is common.

Using /dev/urandom as found on linux and other Unix systems, like macOS, is generally considered quite a good source.

*** Update  - 19th March 2024 ***

The article stands, but more investigation has showed me that the major problem with /dev/urandom is that it is highly biased against repeated numbers. This is not representative of a good pseudo-random generator.

Compared to 𝛑, /dev/urandom gives very few repeated numbers ( 00, 66, 99 etc.), and hardly any occurences of multiple repeats (00000, 66666, 99999). This is a weakness to cryptanalysis.

So, if using /dev/urandom, it would be wise to process all sequences to add ('at random') repeats of numbers, allowing even long strings of repeats, maybe up to 8 repeated numbers, inserted at pseudo-random intervals.

*** End of Update ***

The initial statistics

To get a good characterisation of a sequence of 'random' numbers, you need quite a lot of them, so I generated 152,256,840,500 four digit hex numbers, like this:

od -x -An  </dev/urandom >fill_with_urandom

The 1.52 * 10^11, or just over a tenth of a billion, numbers take up 709Gb, and took 10 hours, 3 minutes and 59 seconds to generate on a Mac mini M2. 

To get an idea of the shape, I counted the number of times each hex number, from 0000 to ffff occurred. That's 65536 numbers. 

So the expected frequency would be 2323255 for each number, if they turned up equally often. The statistics give:

Min:              2316807  

Max:     2329592 

Mean:     2323255 

Standard Deviation:    1529.303 

Median:     2323255 

Fivenum:             2316807 2322219 2323255 2324284 2329592 

Skewness:     0.0004868033  

Kurtosis:             3.004057

As you can see, the mean is exactly that, and the standard deviation only 1529, which is only .0658%. The mean and median are the same, which also shows a very even spread of frequencies.

If the figures were distributed exactly in a normal distribution, the Skewness would be 0 and the Kurtosis 3. So it is extremely close.

Using XOR to produce a new sequence of numbers

In theory, if you xor one random sequence with another, you ought to get another, quite different random sequence. I thought it would be interesting to do just this.

First I produced a new sequence by xoring each number with its neighbour, doing it in groups of eight - making up the eighth number by xoring the first with the eighth. Using the same Mac mini M2, this took 34 hours, or  1 day, 10 hours, 13 minutes and 44 seconds.

The same statistics as above, gives:

Min: 2317159 

Max: 2330445 

Mean: 2323255 

Standard Deviation: 1530.588 

Median: 2323262 

Fivenum: 2317159 2322224 2323262 2324284 2330445 

Skewness: 0.001143814 

Kurtosis: 3.001915 

This is impressively different. The mean and median are different. However, the spread is almost exactly the same, 1530, instead of 1529 for the standard deviation.

What I found interesting were the last two.

The Skewness is   0.001143814  compared to 0.0004868033 the first being 2.35 times bigger! Though they are tiny numbers, that is a big difference.

The Kurtosis is 3.001915 compared to 3.004057, again, small, but the difference is about double.

Using XOR a second time

I now performed exactly the same operation as above, but using the new sequence as a starting point. This gave:

Min: 2316959 

Max: 2330963 

Mean: 2323255 

Standard Deviation: 1523.088 

Median: 2323254 

Fivenum: 2316959 2322234 2323254 2324272 2330963 

Skewness: 0.005033493 

Kurtosis: 3.03291 

The standard deviation at 1523 is similar to the previous two  1530, 1529 but different enough to show a different shape.

This is confirmed, with:

                       1st                         2nd                    3rd

Skewness:  0.001143814   0.0004868033.     0.005033493 

Kurtosis:    3.001915          3.004057            3.03291 

This time both are very different to the previous two - the skewness five times the first set, and the kurtosis difference ten times greater. All three showing very different shapes.

The final test - xoring the previous sequence

 Instead of over each set of eight numbers, taking five lines at a time, and xoring sets of 40 numbers at a time (with the 40th result being the 1st xored with the 40th). This gives:

Min: 2317132 

Max: 2330652 

Mean: 2323255 

Standard Deviation: 1523.587 

Median: 2323256 

Fivenum: 2317132 2322226 2323256 2324275 2330652 

Skewness: 0.00861003 

Kurtosis: 3.021 

The standard deviation is very similar to the previous run,  1523.587 vs  1523.088. The mean and median again differ by only one, but in the opposite direction.

Then: 

                       1st                         2nd                    3rd                4th

Skewness:  0.001143814   0.0004868033.     0.005033493.  0.00861003 

Kurtosis:    3.001915          3.004057            3.03291           3.021

Conclusions 

These results, using 152 milliard four digit hexadecimal numbers give /dev/urandom a fairly thorough test, showing it is, indeed, highly stochastic.

The experiments using xor, show that xoring a sequence of numbers, with itself, produces another random sequence that is significantly different, including having a different shape, but is still a good pseudo-random sequence.

The latter two sequences do show an increased skewness, and a greater distance from a standard deviation.  In a sense, suggesting they have become more stochastic.

It looks as if it would be interesting to try a final experiment, with, the 4th sequence, but, maybe, taking it in batches of 80 numbers.

 

Eulogy to my halogen air-fryer / oven

Our halogen oven / air-fryer is a delight, and amazing technological improvement from the, already wonderful, invention of the air-fryer itself.

Having just cleaned my halogen air-fryer for the third time, since getting it last November, I thought eulogise it here, rather than boring people on Facebook with all the detail, I'll just point here, so most people can ignore it.

Yes, it is so easy, and satisfying to clean that I've cleaned it to sparkling clarity three times - it took ten minutes this time, because I'd made the mistake of cooking pastry (salmon en croute) on the grill, rather than on a piece of foil, usually, after its 'self-clean', it takes a minute to wipe it down.

Meanwhile our conventional oven has probably been cleaned annually over the past few years, maybe a little more often, but always an unpleasant, tedious job, including lots of powerful, pongy chemicals and the need to wear gloves.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, an 'eulogy' (eu = good, logy = words) is not only for the dead, our air-fryer is still in robust good health being in use most days, often for the perfect toasted cheese snack.

Over Christmas, I remarked, when we'd just had loin of wild venison, with roast potatoes - all cooked in 25 minutes. The venison is, accounting for the recency effect, the best I've had. Pink in the middle, succulent, moist, and tasty beyond my imagining. 

In a conventional oven, it'd have taken much longer, and would certainly have been dryer (despite the bacon wrapping and sauce), with a less full flavour. I'm very deply impressed!

The versatility is hugely impressive. The only single thing I've had to cook in our conventional oven is the Christmas goose, simply because it was too huge to fit - it only just fitted in the oven. Everything else, including the goose pie, made from that goose, has been halogened - I think a verb form of 'halogen' is now required.

Being able, with no effort, to see the food as it cooks, is a huge benefit, and the lovely warm glow of the oven makes the kitchen, in Winter, seem even more welcoming than usual.

The have to be some things that are less than perfect. The main one is that, the top, being very hot after cooking, can't be put down, so you have to get things out one-handed. The solution will be to put a large, sturdy hook above the oven, where the lid can be hung when getting things out - I'm going to make sure it's high enough and properly positioned so it's difficult to burn your forearms whilst doing this.

Apart from that, it is is quite magnificent. 

TheT lhat halogen oven is quite something! We've just had loin of wild venison, with roast potatoes - all cooked in 25 minutes. The venison is, accounting for the recency effect, the best I've had. Pink in the middle, succulent, moist, and tasty beyond my imagining.

In a conventional oven, it'd have taken much longer, and would certainly have been dryer (despite the bacon wrapping and sauce), with a less full flavour. I'm very deeply impressed!

Seeing - myopia, presbyopia, astigmatism - why can't children get new lenses?

 Seeing is an essential part of being

Being able to see matters. If we can't see, we are unable to take a full part in normal human activities. Replacing our natural lenses with plastic lenses is an amazingly effective way of restoring sight to people with myopia, presbyopia and astigmatism, but it is usually only used when people have cataracts.

I have been short-sighted (myopic) all my life - before my lens replacement, I was measured as being -12 diopters in terms of my myopia, my astigmatism was extreme, and, beyond that, I was able to see things less clearly, and differentiate colours badly, because of my presbyopia (old-age related vision decline) and my cataracts (that were clouding my vision).

This is not a sob-story about me. Many people are in just this position, and, often, when much younger than I was when my lenses were replaced.

When I was very young, my myopia was diagnosed, and I was prescribed the usual thick bottle-bottom lenses. I thought these were a huge improvement.

Later in life, I heard about Lasik, laser surgery to improve vision. So, I went for it. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life. As the laser cut away my eye, I could smell the burning. I was unable to be exposed to any bright lights, without pain, for three days afterwards. It took me several weeks to recover. I still felt pleased, after that, that I had done it, because I thought that my vision was so much better. I still needed glasses to read, and I still couldn't see things as other people saw them, but I didn't know that, so I thought it was a brilliant improvement.

Several years later, my optician examined my eyes, and said that I was developing cataracts. He referred me to a surgeon. This was a major turning point in my life.

The surgeon arranged for an operation to replace my lenses with plastic lenses - not the lenses in my glasses, the lenses in my eyes. I was quite apprehensive about this, because the lasik surgery had been so horribly painful for so long.

I need not have worried. My lens replacement surgery was completely painless - I really mean that, I had no discomfort whatsoever, none at all.

I could not believe the difference! Suddenly, colours were bright and I could see a huge range of colours. I could also see features far away, on the mountain, so clearly that I thought they might be artificial. When I went to the supermarket, for the first time, I could read all the signs, above the aisles, saying what was being sold there - before, I'd thought it was some sort of joke to expect people to read them, unless they were immediately below them, and I wondered why they bothered... Now I could see that the far aisle was for pickles and pasta - it was a revelation!

Yes, I still need reading glasses to see something close up. Yes, years, now, after the operation, the unbelievable brilliance of colour that I saw after my operation has settled down - our brain accommodates to things and they seem less exceptional. Still, my experience of the world is so rich and varied, and clear, compared to what it was during the first fifty years of my life that it continues to amaze me. Just this afternoon, I was looking at a tree at the bottom of the garden, and marvelling at how I could see all the leaves, not a a blur, but as leaves, and I could see the bright blue of the sky and the many different greens of the tree - for most of my life, this has been impossible.

So, with all this wonder, and improvement, what is my point?

Why can't we offer young children, with bad myopia and bad astigmatism, lens replacement? Why should they wait until they are old enough to have cataracts?

If only, as a child, my lenses had been replaced, my life would have been quite different. I'd have found microscopes and telescopes useful instruments - as it was, I wondered why anybody bothered, because, to me, they just offered blurs. I could have seen the beauty of mountains, I might have been able to play sport - I hated rugby and cricket because I could not see the ball. It seem silly to say this, but, when they sneered at me for dropping the ball it was because I only actually saw the ball when it was a metre of so from me, far too late to catch it.

Can't we spare children this diminished perceptions?

Can't we give people with bad eyesight good lenses?

I really think that we should. Contact lenses, glasses, laser-eye-surgery, all seem to offer improvement, b ut, from personal experience, I know they are actually quite useless. The only thing that really works to fix your eyesight is new artificial lenses.

Depression - it's not just feeling bleak

 I've been depressed twice.  By that, I mean diagnosed as clinically depressed, no simply 'feeling bleak'

There's something wrong with the diagnosis of 'depression', because it is so very easy to think that it is the same as 'being depressed' - It is not

The first time I was clinically depressed was back in the 1990's. I was not coping with life, and used the company mental health option to uget an interview with as 'counsellor'. He listened to me for about half an hour, then showed me a picture of the signs of depression, and explained that I fell into all of these, from what I'd said.

So, I went to my GP, and got a prescription for Prozac. The odd thing was that it worked at once, within a week, I was feeling better. SSRIs are not supposed to work that quickly, but the did. It might have been the   placebo effect, but, within three days, I felt better, and started to engage with life.

 I was lucky. I got better, and started to understand the reasons for my depression. Mainly, it was because I'd broken up a relationship

So, I'm an analytical sort  of person. I score quite high on the autism scale, meaning that I analyse things, before feeling them.

Twenty years later, I suffered a few set-backs. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I spent time with her during her treatment. Her brother dies. My father died. I was stabbed seven times by a burglar. I was suffering severe financial difficulties, and I couldn't see a way out.

What's really peculiar is that, from all of the above, I didn't realise that depression was a likely outcome.

I found that I couldn't do anything. I spent my time in bed.

I started to think about suicide. I looked at sites that sold inert gassed, such a nitrogen, that I knew would establish an easy death. I worked our ways to kill myself - but, at the same time, tried to make a distance, so that the means to kill myself were not immediately to hand. I had to be that, if I killed myself, I was not just on the spur of the moment.

I told GP about these suicidal thoughts, and he referred me to a psychiatrist, who, after a chat, said, a if it was obvious that I was depressed.

I understood, then, what the problem was. I'd managed, over several years, to keep mysense of self under control by going to Amsterdam and having huge doses of psilocybin, in the form of truffles, from magic mushrooms. These helped me centre myself, and resolved the depression completely.

It has still been a struggle. I'm coping today, but I look out for the signs - I mainly sleep around 11 hours a day, which is more than it should be, but, I'm coping, despite that.

What's amazing to me now, that I'm better, is that I still sleep far more than most people. The great thing is that I've not had any thoughts of killing myself for over a year.

It's odd, really, that it should be such a defining thing, but, if you are reading this, please accept that it is. The practical working out of how you are going to take your own life isn't what you think it is - it's not a conclusion, it's a symptom.

Understand that, and you're on the way back to happiness.

The power, and weakness of metaphor

We use metaphors all the time, hardly noticing that we do. They're an essential part of our thinking apparatus, enabling us to transfer notions from one, usually concrete, domain into other abstract domains.

They're so powerful, ubiquitous and unnoticed, that it's useful to see what happens when one doesn't work.

In the late 1970s,  was lucky enough to meet the HP programmable calculator, the 9100A. It was the size of a microwave oven and you could store instructions on little magnetic strips to execute as programs later.

It didn't have an alphanumeric keyboard, the commands available were on the keys - as with later HP handheld calculators, one key could have more than one meaning. The screen showed the x,y and z registers. You could connect a plotter to it, and the physics department had given me the exercise to plot the orbit of the earth around the sun.

Mostly everything made sense, but there was one part of the set-up that puzzled me considerably.

There were a few keys connected to 'flags'. You could 'set' or 'clear' a flag, and then test to see if a flag was 'set' or 'cleared'. I could understand why these were useful, because they allowed simple binary decisions to be made, based on earlier results.

What didn't make sense to me was the term 'flag', and it being used in this way. I knew about flags as things made of cloth that were run up flagpoles by people who were keen on that sort of thing - the same sort of people, usually, who were keen on uniforms, marching about, and killing people.

It wasn't clear to me how these flags were connected to the ones on the 9100. What was, to me, particularly puzzling was how anybody would think of a flag as 'set' or 'clear' and how you'd know which state a flag was in. If the flag metaphor was used, I'd have expected 'raised' or 'lowered' or 'half-mast' to be the terms used.

I wasn't able to resolve this from the manual, because it seemed to assume familiarity with flags used in this way, and nowhere described where the metaphor came from.

It was about four years later, when I visited California for the first time, that I discovered what it was all about. I'd seen photographs of letterboxes in America, and noticed them in films. They were cylindrical, with a flattened bottom and a hinged door. I was surprised by their uniformity, being used to seeing many different designs, not just one.

The other feature they had was a key-shaped bit of metal mounted about half way down. This, I discovered, was the source of the metaphor. This wasn't just a bit of decoration, but a signalling device. People who lived in the US knew this, and called the bit of metal a 'flag'. The protocol was that, when he deliver the post, the postman would raise the 'flag', thus 'setting' it. This signalled to somebody looking across the front garden that there was new post. When you collected the post, you'd put the 'flag' down (clearing the flag), to indicate that the postbox was empty. [I've now been corrected, you can see in the comments below. Apparently you, the owner of the letterbox 'set' the flag to indicate a letter was waiting to be collected, and the postman 'clears' it, by putting it back down, indicating that the letter has been collected, and that you have new post - the opposite of how I'd understood it... making it even clearer how difficult it can be to understand a metaphor from an alien source].

The alternative etymology, that might be behind the letterbox usage, is the 'flag' used on a taximeter to indicate if it is free, or 'for hire', or occupied, 'hired'. The OED doesn't give etymology for the computing use, so this isn't certain.

Clearly, the makers of the HP9100A, who lived in California, and worked for Hewlett-Packard, who'd paid for me to travel to California, as their employee, knew all about this, and thought the principle universal. Which was why there was no explanation of what 'setting' or 'clearing' these 'flags' was about.

In the years since, when meeting difficult metaphors, or thinking of a metaphor to describe something myself, I've often remembered this problem. If you are going to use a metaphor, you have to make sure that your audience will be familiar with whatever it is that you are going to use as a metaphor. Otherwise it will fail to communicate your idea - or, if it does, it'll involve a special effort of interpretation by the reader to work out what you were getting at.

Management Dream

Notes:

- First day as  a new manager

- Big HP office glass box in the middle. Decided not to bags a desk, but hover between the exposed space, with light, near the corridor, and the cave-like space in the middle. Hoping to have us moved some where better.

- Asked team to come up with agreement on what to use for rotas & scheduling by lunchtime - if they came to blows, I'd be excused as it was a first day

- Decided to order printers - discussed options like fan-fold, holes, considered noise - thought it a good plan to find out about my budget, learn how purchasing worked, and find out how noise-averse our neighbours were, and, by this means, who they were, and whether they'd help us move somewhere else.

- Went to find out about site meetings -- delighted to find a manager who said there were several a day, but kept a jar filled with minutes from all those worth knowing about, about six rolls of minutes - said he kept it fairly up to date

- My manager away, broken leg, skiing accident

- Leave out the bit about kangaroos and needing a seprate kanga-bog for the little ones

- Wondered whether to take my team out to lunch, it being the first day, thought about whether it'd be the canteen or local pub, realising either would set all sorts of precedents,. Decided to suggest the canteen, but allow myself to be persuaded the pub would be a better idea, as long as it was informal and not me taking everybody out. The excuse of leaving that to my manager, when he came back with his leg in plaster, seemed sound

- Had wondered if I should start clearing up the area and bags a desk, or if I should find where facilities was and see if they could help (unlikely on the first day, but I'd learn who'd given them the best bribes last year). 

- I wasn't quite sure who my team was, there were various people floating about the area. I hoped that lunch and the group task would sort it out, more or less.

On the merit two-dimensionalality

If you left your tennis racquet out in the rain, without its press, you learnt that being three-dimensional is not always a blessing.

My last tennis racquet was made of ultra-light metal, and strung with plastic, nylon, I think, so you could keep it in the bath, and it'd still work. It didn't even have a cover.

Two books that I prized greatly as a child were volumes I & II of 'How things work'. I think they were a present. I'd have thought they might have been from my mechanically minded uncle, but I think they were more probably from my parents, or brother. Probably my brother.

My uncle once gave me a set of chest-expanders for Christmas. I had no idea that anybody would use such things voluntarily, and still don't understand people who do. I was so disgusted that I didn't, fortunately, probably, even think about how the springs could have been adapted into a trebuchet.

'How things work' were wonderful books. Volume I rather better than Volume II, which seemed something of an afterthought, but they didn't explore the medical, surgical or veterinary worlds much, so there wasn't anything about the making of tennis racquets and what went on at the cat-gut factory. I looked, specially, so I know this, and still don't know if they use(d?) machines or people who were very good with scissors.

Wikipedia tells me they use sheep or goats, rather than cats, something that'd have been hard to find out then. This aside in wikipedia has me wondering 'Lean animals yield the toughest gut', so, if you're going to use somebody's guts for garters, make sure he's not too skinny.

Technological improvement is a wondrous thing, but, somehow, it seems sad that boys of today don't have a chance to think of the relative merits of the four-screw press over the fast-release lever press for racquets, or to wonder what happens at the cat-gut factory.

Plagiarism dream

Told by a fellow student (or senior student, or lecturer) that the professor and head of department have a heard an accusation of plagiarism against me.

It turns out that it isn't. I'm accused of having a book on (by?? - it's a dream, maybe my unconscious doesn't know Socrates didn't write any books) Socrates prominently displayed in my room, but not to have read it - hardly plagiarism, hardly a crime. I protest that there's nothing wrong with that, then the accusation is spelt out in more detail. I've told people about things in the book, as if I've read the book, whilst I've still been reading through it - keeping one chapter ahead of the class, as it's known. This, too isn't a crime.

However, I'm delighted to realise that both the prof. and the head of department (It's not sure why there's an heirarchy here, you'd expect it to be one and the same person, unless it's an aspro) have believed the accusation, believed it is wrong, and also known how it's done. So, I think, in the dream, must have been guilty of it themselves.

On waking I wonder how such a strangely convoluted dream could come about, and how I'd not thought that the lecturer, prof., and head of department may not have done it themselves, but encountered other students that had done it.

Anyway, I clearly felt better to be vindicated, at least in my own mind, and, in the dream, flew (well, an extended floating jump) from the back, at the top of the tiered lecture theatre down to the front in a series of triumphant, sweeping dance-like descending stages - slowing my descent by touching the side-wall, or panelling on the side-wall.

The bunny gardener

The Bunny gardener.

We’d only been waiting a few minutes, when I saw the large, white rabbit walking purposely up the hill, along the pavement, towards us, unaccompanied.

I was with my brother in the small, trim garden. The others had gone ahead to chapel, and, if there was time, we were to join them. I think we were in Wales, at the house of a relative - though not an aunt, as she didn’t look like any of our three aunts. It was a very quiet Sunday morning with nobody about.

The bunny came into the garden, gave us a nod, and started to take care of the most obvious chores, nibbling off a dying branch from one of the rose bushes and dragging it to the heap in the corner that was clearly going to be the bonfire later.

Then he came to look at the provisions we’d laid out for him, clearly satisfied with the milk, carrots and, I think, oatmeal. Then he gave a start, almost gave us a disapproving look, and started looking through one of the bags we’d brought the provisions in with the air of somebody not expecting to find anything.

It suddenly came to me, I remembered out instructions. I said:

‘I’m so sorry! I realise that we didn’t get the mutton kebabs. We’ll get some as soon as we can, and have them ready for you when you come back on….’

‘..Wednesday’, my brother said. I’d not remembered the day.

The bunny stopped looking, and went back to gardening. I don’t think he could speak, but, if he had, it’d have surprised me less than him arriving on his own.

It was, we’d learned, a standard arrangement, you got hold of the bunny, through a ‘phone call, and he turned up at the stipulated time, getting on with the job happily, and extremely efficiently, wanting only to have the right provisions. 

Unusually, he was a carnivorous rabbit, at least to the extent of mutton kebabs.

We went inside, leaving him to work, deciding, without much regret, well, without any, actually, that we were too late to make chapel. We settled down to wait, after having made a note to get the kebabs, and, a few minutes later, everybody came back from chapel.

It was a most vivid dream. The rows of houses, with small front gardens, on each side of the road curving downwards are sharp in my memory, as was the garden of the house itself, with somewhat fussy brick flowerbeds in front of the chocolate-boxy house. It was the chapel, and the general atmosphere, that made me think it must be Wales, though it was very certainly much to smart and affluent to be sad Rhymney.

I’m no fan of dream interpretation, since, more often as not, cigars are just cigars and bunnies, rabbits.

I also know that other people’s dreams are of very little interest, only our own dreams fascinate us.

Still, since this was one of the more outré dreams I’ve ever had, I thought I’d write it down, whilst I remembered. 

I know why, particularly, I wasn’t keen on going to chapel. When I went, with my mother, in Rhymney, when eleven, I wanted to sing the familiar hymns, but found the hymnbooks impenetrable, being written in Welsh. 

We’ve never had rabbits as pets. I know no bunnies. So I’ve no idea why I dreamt of the bunny gardener, but I’m pleased that I did. Peculiar as it was, it was a most peaceful and pleasant dream.

The oddest thing about it was that I thought it odd that the bunny came to us unaccompanied, usually, in dreams, you don’t question that sort of thing.

A magical Easter morning

I was treated to an amazing experience this morning. I drove into town, on my 'bike, as usual, for my swim, at the Long Street Baths. It's a magnificent, clear, bright sunny morning, with Table Mountain sharp and clear, after the recent, blessèd rain.

As I walked into the changing-rooms, empty, as you'd expect on a holiday, I was transfixed by the beautiful sound of a hymn being sung in the pool-hall. As you'd expect, the acoustics of a large municipal swimming pool are impressive.

There were about twenty people, around the shallow-end, singing mindfully, eyes closed, with close harmonies, and extemporized descants, over a confident, joyful, rhythmic and unhurried rendition - every word clearly annunciated. My mother once said that the only thing that ever made her a little homesick, for the valleys of Wales, was the sound of a Zulu congregation. 

There's no need for a choir, in Wales, as in Africa, the congregation expect, and are expected, to carry the sound entire.

It was, of course, quite unaccompanied by any instrument.

I swam, as they sang, together with two other fortunate swimmers.

It was a mass, full-immersion baptism - if it can be a 'mass baptism' with only half a dozen baptizees. 

One, by one, as we swam, they six were lowered into the water, then, emerging, clapped by all, and photographed by flashing cell-phones. 

Smiles of delight welcoming them back to the dry poolside.

Vanity can't have been discussed much, during their catechism, because one baptizee wrapped a large, green plastic bag about her head, so as not to spoil her hairdo.

As I changed back, and got ready to return home, the closing hymn was echoing through the changing-rooms, that, for  that moment, were the cloisters of heaven.

Zen-like patience - James May re-assembles a lawnmower

An introduction to developing a Zen-like patience.

If you like this sort of thing, this is a perfect exemplar of precisely the sort of thing you will like. If you don't, ditto.

This lawnmower has 331 bits. I doubt this is intentional. Neatness would either have added an extra two bits, washers would have done, to get an even 333, or left out a bit, one must be otiose, to get 330.

I'm not sure if there's any connection to deep complexity, but the human body starts with 206 bones (well, at the arbitrary point of birth, clearly the zygote has none), and ends up with 350. For a lawnmower to come in at 331, does, if you're suggestible in this way, suggest some lawishness must be involved somewhere.

I could never do this. The number of fiddly bits and stages involved would drive me to distraction. That James May had only one period, of a mere 30 minutes, involving blasphemy, does, indeed, establish that his patience is close to that of a zen master. If you haven't the patience even to watch the demonstration (compressed), of deep patience, it was the piston rings that led to the blasphemy.

It's also a good demonstration of masculinity. It's unlikely that many people find masculinity puzzling, as James observes, it's more femininity that has that reputation. Still, if you do, this helps.

There's the huge grin, showing deep inner peace, at various stages, where a sense of completion is achieved. This may not simply be masculinity, but part of the 'Do' ( Korean 도, Japanese 導 or Chinese 道 [or 道], the 'way-of' or 'path to' working. The way-of-working needed to do something, in this case, long and fiddly.

There's also the 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' style use of the assembly, and stages of the assembly, as metaphors for life.

The sharp blade is supposed to cut business cards. It would have been sufficient to cut just one card, just the once. It is, of course, impossible for anybody who started life as a boy, to do this. He had to cut it three times - for the camera. Probably two or three more times for himself, off-camera.

The film also, incidentally, complies to the Dogme 95 dogma.

Thanks to James Gander  for introducing this to me.

.

https://plus.google.com/10898143749068217…/posts/c8VWeqsAThg

I probably shouldn't be impressed by the Cape Town water department, but I am.

I probably shouldn't be impressed by the Cape Town water department, but I am. No doubt they were only doing their job, but I think we can still be impressed by a job well done.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, a Saturday, a water main burst in Observatory. It was at the top of Station Road, just below the traffic lights on Lower Main Road. Somebody who saw the damage said that it looked like the aftermath of a small earthquake. We don't get earthquakes in Cape Town much, the last minor tremor was in Tulbagh, 121km away, in December, and, the last big earthquake, the biggest in South African history, was a 6.3 in the same place, in 1969. So he must have known what they looked like from photographs.

It must have been in the early hours, because we still had a trickle at six in the morning.

I'm not sure the first time they were told about it, but they had the area cordoned off, with men working on it, by nine. When we went past at midday, the men had dug a deep trench. When we came past again, at three in the afternoon, they had a huge back-hoe digging an even bigger trench.

The water was back on again at about five.

We are very short of water, at the moment, not, fortunately, anything like as bad as further North, where there is a terrible drought, but the dam water levels this year are the lowest they've been over the past five years, though the levels did build up considerably in February, despite it being the dry season. There's a picture of the levels at our largest reservoir, 'Theewaterskloof' below.

So it's important that bursts are repaired quickly, and good to know just how quickly they can be repaired, and how good our water department is at their jobs. Congratulations!

The Hateful Eight - Quentin Jerome Tarantino's film

Naming a film, 'The Hateful Eight', in order to remind anybody watching that this is your eight film, isn't the act of a modest man, but, if anybody were concerned that Mr Tarantino had been replaced by a  doppelganger, this, along with the extreme, and, somewhat, gratuitous violence in the film, ought to put his mind at rest.

Though Mr Tarantino doesn't credit Laurence Sterne for the smashing of the fourth wall as an art form, he does do it as well as Mr Sterne does in 'Tristam Shandy'. I think he'd call it 'post modern', as, too, no doubt, he'd also label the other devices found in 'Tristam Shandy', like telling the story in a peculiar order, and adding lots of clever self-reference. Odd, really, that such, albeit unconscious, homage should be given to a book published in 1759, by a chap so keen to be hip and 21st Century as Mr. Tarantino, but there it is.

It is a sound point that the animosities of wars, particularly of civil wars, continue for a considerable time after the mass killing has been stopped. He might be right, but I'm not sure if the possible implication this film intends is really accurate. Do so many current American problems really have their ætiology in the Civil War? He certainly does make a good stab, if you excuse the term in this context, at making that point.

The ghastly characters in the film are nicely drawn, and the dialogue between them is often funny. Their perspectives are sharply drawn, and it's interesting to see what things they appear to hold in common. As far as I can see they hold these views in common:

- Guns are a really good thing
- The Civil War was a really bad thing, but certainly the other side's fault
- Lying is a bad thing, particularly when practiced by somebody else
- Lying is, however, not only inevitable, but ubiquitous, so only actions can be believed
- The pecking order is: White male -> White female -> Black Male -> Black Female -> dog -> Mexican
- Capital punishment, in particular, public execution by hanging, is a good thing. Not for everybody, but essential for some.
- Might is right

The film is evidently, at least at some level, intended to be satirical, so, clearly Mr Tarantino believes some, probably most, of these are not only wrong, but currently ubiquitous enough to require satirical treatment.

The well worn device of having the unlikely collection of characters isolated, in this case by a blizzard, works well. I'm not sure that the indulgence of such a long running time is justified. Certain aspects of the plot, signalled with crystal clarity in the first quarter of the film, are only revealed, as if an amazing surprise, a couple of hours later. I think the film could be much improved by reducing it to normal length.

Roy Orbison's song seems apt as a description of the Civil War, Tarantino films generally, and the problems that he highlights, quite well, all in all:

Now the old folks will remember
On that dark and dismal day
How their hearts were choked with pride
As their children marched away
Now the glory is all gone

They are left alone
And there won't be many coming home
No, there won't be many coming home
oh, there won't be many
Maybe five out of twenty
but there won't be many coming home

x

Moral Copyleft - can open source be closed to immoral use?

The Open Source movement is one of the great modern humanitarian triumphs. There are a number of different licenses that are used to enable the free use and distribution (not necessarily cost-free) of software source code. In particular, it enables the availability of code that can be proven to be free of malicious code (malware), something impossible with software that's distributed 'closed source' in binary.

One important side-effect has been the production of various licensing systems to enable a common pool of intellectual property that's free for everybody to use, not necessarily cost-free, and, usually, modify and redistribute, as long as the licensing follows the changes.

Though it is a humanitarian triumph, and has been championed by humanitarians who objected to the locking away of intellectual property by conventional copyright, there are some problems with it. In particular, it places no restriction on who can use the IP. So it can be put to evil, non-humanitarian uses - something almost certainly not the intent of the humanitarians who put their property under a creative commons or copyleft license.

I propose an alternative license, derivative from copyleft or creative commons licenses. The final license would need to be drawn up legally to avoid as many unintended consequences as possible. However, the idea is simple.

A 'Moral Copyleft' license would, allow free use, modification and distribution, but only for moral uses. For example, a 'Moral Copyleft' license could refuse permission for any arms manufacturer or dealer or organisation that promotes the non-consesual killing of human beings - states that practice capital punishment, or that export terrorism, or practice slavery, or supply drugs or other equipment for use by executioners or armies.

This would prevent a future linux-like platform from being used in military drones, or to manufacture poison gas for use against humans.

There is no reason, today, why somebody should not license work for that cannot be used to promote the eating of meat or working on Sunday or any of the many things individual people might be against.

The difference with this proposal is that, as with creative commons licenses, a free, easy to use, license would be available to any humanitarian who wished to make IP available to everybody, but not at the expense of humanity.

The license would need to reference some body, or bodies, that register immoral usage. Amnesty International, perhaps, or the Campaign against the Arms Trade could keep a register.

Whether other organisations that deliberately kill human beings, such as tobacco companies, would fall under the prohibition of such licenses would be part of the debate needed during the design of the license(s). There might be various levels of moral license, with the basic one being against weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, with more stringent ones available for activities less generally recognised as immoral.

The first step would be to canvas support for this proposal. If there was support, an Aunt Sally license or licenses could then be drawn up for comment and discussion. After that, with sponsorship, a watertight license could be drafted and made available, under its own license (not much of a limitation as it'd be a strange weapons manufacturer that would wish to have a moral license!).

The license could also prohibit use by organisations that act against responsible environmental behaviour - companies that contribute to irresponsible logging in the Amazon, say.

This would enable a moral philanthropist in the future, to donate money to a trust for the development of software or hardware for humanitarian use to have the application of a moral license a condition for funding.

Commercial companies wishing to enhance their environmental and moral image could also use this license for their commercial open source products.

Why do people spend money when they can get something much better free?

This is something that I find very puzzling. I do understand why somebody might wish to buy a diamond, rather than a cubic zirconium - even though it takes an expert to tell the difference, and the subjective experience is identical (well, not quite, because you can have a much bigger cubic zirconium for much less), and there's the benefit of being certain that you haven't bought a blood diamond, the reason people buy them is precisely because they are expensive. De Beers has spent a fortune in marketing, and the world's diamond miners ensure that diamonds only trickle into the market so the price can be kept high.

Do people buy software because it's expensive, though? Is there really some social benefit in announcing that you've been ripped-off? I don't see it.

Many, many, years ago Hewlett-Packard had an e-mail server. Quite a good one. It needed upgrading to deal, but it was basically sound, it was also popular, and sold quite well. However, HP decided to throw the product (HPmail) away. This was simply because, by so doing, they could get a deal with Microsoft to pay much, much less for their software licenses. This was before the days of Linux, and before the days of Apple's OS/X, so, as they saw it, they didn't have much choice, other than to use Microsoft's desktop. It does explain why there aren't many companies offering competitors to Microsoft exchange, though.

However, as everybody knows, well, everybody technical, you don't need exchange at all. You can give your users Outlook as their client, if they really want that, rather than the better solution of Mail on a Mac (much, much cheaper to support, much more reliable, much faster and much easier to use, of course - so, actually, hugely cheaper in terms of ROI an TCO), but use Linux, free, instead of exchange and have a much faster system.

Also, we know from Edward Snowden, even with a firewall, your exchange server is an open book, a complete security disaster, if you worry about security at all, you'd certainly not have one.

Are there any kickbacks? Do IT people who manage to get their employers to buy Exchange get any money or other inducements from the distributors or from Microsoft?

I'd truly like to know, because it's important to know from a governance perspective. A company is obliged, under governance, to make the best use of company assets - paying for an inferior product is poor governance. If this happens, or has happened, a company is also in danger of prosecution under the UK bribery act - if it has any offices in the UK.

The pharmaceutical industry has paid thousands of millions of dollars in fines, over the past few years, for bribing doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists, chemists and others to promote their drugs and force expensive, and often inferior, drugs on us.

Is it likely that the IT industry is completely free of this sort of thing?

Should investment companies or funds be allowed to vote as shareholders?

This is a philosophical question, with implications for jurisprudence. A company is given the status of a corporation (from 'corpus' a body) in the legal fiction that it is an independent agent that can, like human beings, own things and enter into contracts. One question, raised in the 'Unity of the Mind' (ISBN: 9780312120177) is whether there is such a thing as a 'group mind', that would mean that, like Hobbes Leviathan, companies would be genuine agents. This question is connected, but different.

If you own shares in a company, you, as an owner, can influence the direction the company takes by voting at general meetings. That's what that sense of 'ownership' means. If, though, you buy shares in a fund, an investment trust, say, then you're buying a company that buys companies. You're effectively authorising the fund to act as your proxy when voting as a shareholder for the companies that it has bought.

So far so ordinary. The effect this has, though, is to take the control of companies away from direct human control. If most of the shares of a company are owned by other companies, then the directors of the company no longer need to appeal to all their shareholders in order to achieve what they want, they only have to convince the few people, who have the effective proxies from thousands, that it is in their interest.

That's where the temptation to corruption arises. Instead of the stock market helping companies become more open and effective because they are controlled by the will of many shareholders, instead, a few individual humans, who don't own any of the shares themselves, but make a living out of charging those they hold shares for in proxy, make the decisions, because only a few of them are the shareholders.

So the power of these institutional investors tempts companies to court them, rather than the actual shareholders. Instead of needing to, for example, make the company more environmentally friendly, in the interests of many shareholders, they can simply take one person out to expensive lunches or, if they're less scrupulous, bribe directly with money, an not bother.

If voting shares could only be held by natural people, not corporations, investment companies could still make money from owning shares, but the distortion of the control of companies by companies would be avoided. Not completely, because institutional investors could still manipulate companies by taking rewards for buying or selling shares, but this would be less dangerous as there'd still be individual stock holders to prevent the corporation from acting wrongly.

If you see corporations not as legal fictions, but as actual entities, with the same rights and power as individuals, then none of this is a problem.

There is, though, the problem that, since they are not individuals, companies cannot be put in prison. The sanctions open to controlling people are missing.

If you hold that companies should only be owned (in the sense of controlling ownership) by natural persons the danger that rogue companies pose to humanity, by, for example, turning a country into a corporate plutocracy by bribing the governments to act in the interests of the companies, rather than natural human owners, is much reduced.

Art, performance, composition and work - thoughts after watching 'Tim's Vermeer'

A fascinating film. If X -> Z and Y -> Z is X <-> Y?

That's the question. If it is, then Vermeer used almost exactly the same optical equipment. I wasn't convinced before, but, now, it'd take some amazing evidence to convince me that Vermeer didn't.

I warmed to Tim over the film and, somehow, it is necessary (and fun) to watch the film to get the full picture, so to speak.

With Beethoven, you don't get the conductor and orchestra modestly saying that they'd just 'copied his composition' - rather you admire the performance.

Before today, I thought that performance art was a load of tosh. I've now seen Tim perform a work of visual art that really was a magnificent performance - almost like watching Beethoven's 5th being performed.

It reinforces, too, the point that the value of money is not that it brings leisure. For years there was the question about what people would do if there was no 'need to work' for money... but the question was mistaken. We have a need to work, that's far more fundamental than doing it for the money. Yes, of course, one needs money to live - but it was a persistent illusion that that was the reason for work.

The real motivation for work is delight in the work itself. It's been known a long time - karma yoga is the 'yoga of work'. It's proven by the massive amount of hard work that's produced wikipaedia - all of it done for no monetary reward. It's shown too by open source software being so much better than software that's written commercially.

Eliot could have been talking about the rediscovery of work:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

What will we do with all the 'leisure time' that computers, machines, robots and the like bring us? We'll work.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/