April 2007
Woody’s Pup Hexayurt Design
Woody Evans figured out how to build a perfectly proportioned hexayurt model from a single 4′x8′ sheet of board material.
It’s a very very clever bit of work, and pictures and the diagram are below.
If you change the cut pattern a little, you can get six walls 4/5ths of a square high.
Here’s how:
Cut the board two, along the long axis, giving you two 2′ x 8′ pieces.
Cut one of those pieces into five identical rectangles.
Cut the other as described to give you the triangles, plus a square, which you trim down into the sixth rectangle.
Not *quite* as elegant as the five wall because it produces some wastage, but workable.
Update - now links to Woody’s page - I didn’t realize he’d posted this!
Collusion on TOR routers?
Implication: somebody’s watching you.
Yes, but is it art?
http://www.robertwechsler.com/images/applied_geometry.jpg
Joi Ito on Meditation
I’ve had tangential contact with Joi over the years. Went out for breakfast with him in Aspen with my ex-wife at one point (before she was my wife, never mind my ex-wife.) Really a funny, smart chap. I started talking about my technology at one point and he assumed he’d been stealth-pitched at one point and slammed shut like a clam, which was a shame, because up until then we’d been having a really good time.
Money changes everything and I wasn’t looking for any that day, I was just talking about ideas.
Anyway, interesting to see that he’s blogging about meditation via twitter / jaiku. Profound mismatch of medium and massage…
Year Zero
Trent Reznor has, it turns out, not only not lost it, but matured into a really profound voice.
YZ is cheesy in places. It cannot be denied that there are a few place where he’s going for an effect that nobody can quite pull off except live. But songs repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and grow richer and not tired, and he hasn’t pulled that off for quite some time.
It’s not Laurie Anderson’s “Big Science” for a darker age. Not quite.
No. Its a mature voice. He’s been, apparently, through hell and back, and now he’s got something to say not about the personal angst of the early brilliant material, or the muddled middle years where, well, now that he was no longer dying alive, there was nothing to say.
Now it’s turned outwards: its a NIN album about the world, not about Trent Reznor’s personal crisis.
There’s a little greatness in this piece of music. He’s got an edge now, a force, that really belies the raw venting of the early material. He’s the only musician that I listened to obsessively when I was growing up and maturing who seems to have genuinely transformed, transmuted and changed - to have matured as an artist, not simply grown older.
He should try politics.
Etymotic ER-20 - Cheap Musician’s Ear Plugs - $12 a pair, good tech, recommended.
ER•20 High Fidelity Earplugs
So, what we have here is ear plugs that have three soft rubber flanges and an engineered plastic stick. Somehow what this produces is a funny thing - ear plugs you can’t hear. Things are quieter, but sound just the same otherwise. Soon, you forget that they’re there.
Apart from the plastic stick coming out of your ear, that is.
I’m finding them a little uncomfortable but I have weird ears.
That additional flattening of the response curve really makes a big difference. So much of the experience of regular ear plugs is muffling, the sense of insulated, muffled private space. These don’t produce it. It’s just quieter. Very interesting from a psycho-accoustic point of view too.
Iceland may not be the ideal place to test these. Concert venues are loud to the point where a 29db foam plug is barely enough, so I’m expecting to take these as well as the others simply to handle places where 20db is insufficient.
For twelve bucks a pair, I think these are pretty much an essential buy.
The Five Pillars of the New Society
1> Mahatma Gandhi showed that in some cases, poor people could resist political oppression by economic warfare and collected, calm non-cooperation. If he is understood as an economist, who understood that increasing self-sufficiency reduces the dependence on the State, and therefore, if the State is run by your oppressors, for your oppressors, you get a breakthrough. Gandhi figured out how to get the people to stop paying for their own oppression through their taxes. Do not buy or sell from the English, and now they are paying to control you without covering the costs of their control. They must therefore eventually stop. There is, of course, more to it than that, but this is the basics of my insight into Gandhian economics, which is, I think, a misunderstood and under-applied aspect of the Master of Peace’s work.
2> Buckmister Fuller’s work on reducing the overheads of living well synergizes with Gandhi’s economics, because Gandhian-style self reliance produces poverty. There are hard limits to the standard of living which a single individual can produce without access to amortized capitalization in the form of tools, and Ricardian advantage through doing what they do well, and trading with other specialists, through (often international) trade and economies of scale. Gandian techniques were optimized for peasants. Bucky offers the possibility of taking the energy and materials budgets of people living at almost that level of wealth, and producing a flourishing, wealthy independence and interdependence in key areas like taking one project’s waste streams and using them as materials for another project.
3> Richard Stallman’s work on the economies of post-scarcity societies is critical. Although widely believed to be a civil rights and computing freedoms guru I think that history might recognize Stallman as having invented the first genuine competitor to the Corporation as a way of amortizing the cost and sharing the risks of large scale human endeavors. Because Fuller’s work was entirely tied up with patents (because he wanted to enter it into Humanity’s permanent records) it could not scale rapidly - an effect he apparently understood and accepted. Stallman - thank God - gave us tools to take good ideas and push them out in myriad co-evolving forms rapidly and cheaply, and critically, with productive capacity scaling rapidly to meet demand through volunteer labor. He invented the Prosumer (producer-consumer) in the form of the programmer writing their own software and tools, which they owned the rights to rather than having them be owned by the company, chaining them as a for-pay cog in the machine.
4> George Mason teaches us about individual freedom. Gandhi’s empire collapsed into a democracy when he was murdered but if he had ruled a long life, as the generally assented leader of the Unified Indian Nation, do you think we could have trusted his successors? History teaches us to beware the inheritors of empires. I will not wax lyrical about the foundations of America given the current sorry state of our favorite of the new nations, but you know what goes here: people, such as Mason, who would not sign the Constitution because it did not yet have a Bill of Rights are to be respected, as is that Bill. It is a good template, I think, for liberty and democracy. Needs work because times have changed, of course. As open source projects scale, and as alternative infrastructures run more and more of the planet (both corporate, free/libre and individualistic) we will refer frequently to the collective of the thinkers on Freedom, including these people, and the likes of Hayek too. It is notable that this thinking does not have a single face, as befits the roots of democracy.
5> The fifth pillar is taken from both the Hindus and the Liberals/Libertarians/Founders/Masons of the world. It is the right of each person to believe as they will - one god, all gods, no gods, or any other imaginable permutation. The State is an agreement between people and those Divine Theocracies which claim that political power flows not from the will of the people, but from the barrel of a gun or a Divine Writ must be stopped at all costs from enslaving the rest of us with their religiously-founded laws. Unlike many thinkers in the field, I’m a devout man with strong respect for my native tradition, Hinduism, and also Christianity, Sufi Islam, and many other traditions I’ve had much less contact with. I believe that in the political sphere, religious beliefs must remain as a human prerogative, even if within the religious tradition, politics is seen as being a religious issue. I believe that this approach offers the most promising outlook for a thriving and liberal political, social, moral, ethical and spiritual order.
All of this is in the Hexayurt Project but embodied as a design for a award-winning, govt. backed free-as-in-speech refugee shelter system.
2D barcodes
Take a cryptographic key, encode as a 2D barcode, then load on to a camera phone by taking a picture of the key. Generalizes to other devices of course.
Public disclosure
Just to be sure this isn’t patentable.
1> Delicately manipulate a digital image to change it’s SHA1 hash and make bitwise comparison impossible. Options include taking a larger image and changing the subset of the image rendered down into a smaller image (i.e. moving the crop lines), adjusting brightness, contrast and other variables, like color balance, by an amount which alters the image but does not make it look all that different, tweaking compression parameters and so forth.
2> Checking a certificate revocation list or other centralized databases without GUIDS. Couple of notions in this direction. Firstly, have the GUID which is being checked on the CRL list be encrypted. Have a list of keys corresponding to persons of interest. If the GUID comes in can be decrypted, then this person is a POI. If it can’t be decrypted, the agency doing the checking has no idea who had their CRL checked.
A second approach is that the GUIDS for a given individual are one-use, but generated in a repeatable fashion (PRNG). So the POI database can be populated with the GUIDS of POIs - all of them - and if an GUID is in the database, a flag is raised.
GREAT list of OS X tips
Lots of extremely arty fiddly low level command line stuff for controlling desktop apps, things you just didn’t know, potential lifesavers etc.