Pie Palace

Today I discovered the joy of background research. My research group at Carleton has been working on getting a paper together for VEE 2006, describing a possible language feature that we’d come up with. Essentially, we wanted to add opcode-level macros to Java; potentially for in-memory code-space optimization. We’ve been working on it for the past couple of weeks, checking to see how many repeated subsequences there are in the JRE, if our effort would have any real impact. We were doing the background research in parallel, checking to see if this was an idea that had already been proposed.

Sadly, it had. We just hadn’t run into it until today. At least two groups had thought of this idea in the late ’90s. Both had discovered that GZIPing the opcode stream provided commiserate compression levels, with a relatively small speed hit.

Anyhow, that’s the end of our draft for VEE 2006. And it’s cemented my reluctant belief that Carleton doesn’t have enough people working with the Java VM for me use that as a thesis topic. Barring a miracle, it looks like I’ll be heading back to my work with reconstructing network data.

In my post about Barrymore’s Hallow’een show I neglected to mention the belly dancers. These were not your stuffy mom belly-dancers, they were modern, hip-happenin’ hardcore belly dancers. During the danceable portions of the show they hung out in a circle near the edge of the stage and gyrated. What made them noteworthy was that they gyrated in the exact same manner last year, wearing the exact same costumes, in the exact same location. But that’s neither here nor there.

What matters is that you can now enjoy the crappy musical experience of a Barrymore’s Hallow’een right in your own home, by visiting MetalGoddess.net (the home of the heavy-metal belly dancer), and watching their video. Not only does it have bad music that’s impossible to dance to, it’s got belly dancers! Now, to make your experience complete, take a twenty out of your wallet, tear it up into lots of little pieces and eat it (endeavoring not to enjoy the experience, as that would ruin the effect).

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments-avantgo.pl?IDLink=1730698

I’ve just finished the English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. I have to say that it’s a fantastic book. It’s told as a series of diary entries of four main characters (and a handful of supporting characters), following the parallel stories of the eradication of Tasmanian natives in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, and a voyage to find the biblical Eden by a group of narcissistic “explorers.”

The main story is that of a vicar who has formulated a theory of “divine refridgeration” to explain away troubling questions being asked by athiest geologists. The vicar has decided that the way to prove his theory is to show that the Garden of Eden was created on an island of special rock, able to withstand the creation of the earth around it. And the logical place to go looking for such an island is in newly discovered Tasmania.

However the real story seems to be the vaingloriousness of empire — as a backdrop to the exploration, we meet a Tasmanian native, whose life and culture is slowly being shredded by the encroaching British Empire. Watching as whites slowly annex the island feels almost like reading an Iain Banks novel. We can feel the pace of events gradually increasing, and we know that these seemingly harmless events are adding up in a way that the characters haven’t quite grasped, but the depth of the disaster is never quite tangible until it’s too late.

I heartily recommend this book. I’ll be returning it to the library as soon as I can, to ensure that some other lucky soul can take it out.

Despite the horrible racism displayed in the book, a number of the characters (mostly outside of the colonial hierarchy) overcome it. The epilogue contains a portion of a real letter dating from the 1850s, written by John Bradley, the tutor of a native Tasmanian boy who was sent on a whim to England to learn:

I feel much gratified in having had this boy with me, tho’ but a little time, as it confirms me more in the opinion that I have long cherished: that Man is on all parts of the globe the same; being a free agent, he may mould himself to excellence or debase himself below the brute, & that education, government and established customs are the principal causes of the distinctions amoung nations. Let us place indiscriminately all the shades of colour in the human species in the same climate, allow them the same means for development of intellect, I apprehend the blacks will keep packe with the whites, for colour neither impairs the muscles nor enervates the mind. We know that a black horse can match a white one in the race and that Hannibal and his black Africans contended gloriously with Rome for the Empire of the world. May the revolutions of mind establish the empire of reason and benevolence over the ruins of ignorance an prejudice.

I found the racism of the book, and the portrait of the time to be a little hopeless. But the ending of the story, and this quotation both offered a balm.

I administer a number of websites. Some of those sites occasionally get a high volume of web traffic from people, but I’m noticing that I’m getting more and more traffic from web crawlers. Those crawlers can be damn annoying, because:

• They don’t keep cookies. That’s right, even though they are browsing, they ignore cookies. Meaning that any attempt I make to identify a user with a cookie fails on these bots.
• They whack my sites from multiple IP addresses, meaning that I can’t identify the bots by IP. Google is particularly bad for this one.

So far, I’ve seen (as identified by their bot homes):
http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/crawler
http://www.google.com/bot.htm
http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/tech_crawling.html
http://www.dnsgroup.com/
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp
http://www.picsearch.com/bot.html

Update The following bots have gotten in on the action:
LinkWalker (No URL provided)
http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm

Last year I spent a lot of time studying for a course on distributed databases (really distributed data sources, but who’s counting). One of the folks in my study group was from the US, and turned out to be the only real-life Bush support that I’ve ever met. Unsurprisingly, he’s a nice guy, in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. He firmly supports every Bush program that I’ve ever heard of, and is a firm believer in the free market and all of that stuff.

A couple of years back, I bought myself a Darwin-fish T-shirt, which I occasionally wear. It just so happans that I was wearing it yesterday when I wandered into a seminar class that I and our Bush-ite both attend. Upon seeing my shirt, he rushes over to say “What an irony! You’re wearing a Darwin shirt on the same day that I’m reading an intelligent design book.” All the while he’s holding the book up like he’s on some kind of infomercial.

A little part of me implodes: I didn’t think that people like this actually existed. Certainly not as graduate students. Certainly not as programmers. Then my world comes back into focus: it’s okay. This guy isn’t One Of Us, he’s a crazy furreigner with crazy furreign ideas that are beyond my ken. Then my world really does come back into focus: this guy has a completely different viewpoint from me. The set of assumptions he’s chosen are sufficiently different from mine, that our views can’t really be reconciled: we just see the world in a completely different way.

So I ask myself: do I want to borrow this book, and build an argument as to why ID makes absolutely no sense? I spawn a thread to consider that as I ask the guy how he feels about other things, like the Kyoto accord.* The thread joins back pretty quickly with a easy-to-read executive summary: “Why bother? This guy has made up his mind. There are much more profitable ways you can spend your time.” So I terminate the conversation.

The think I don’t understand is that this guy is a programmer. A computer programmer. Everything that we do is based upon testing, experimentation, and evidence. How can this guy ignore evidence? How can he say that certain classes of enquiry are unknowable, and therefore not worthy of examination? How can he say that what is unknowable now will remain unknowable, without further investigation?

Ugh. I suppose I could read his little red book. But really, why bother? ID is intellectually sterile. So long as it doesn’t warp our society into suffocating science, it won’t matter; ’cause it’ll dry up and blow away.

Rosa Parks died last week. And I’ve had the following rant bubbling around in my head ever since I heard the news. My annoyance comes from how Parks is referred to in the press. She’s always refered to singularly, as if it was her action, and her choice that triggered her arrest in Montgomery, Alabama; the subsequent transit boycott; and the subsequent court ruling making Jim Crow laws illegal.

Rosa Parks’ act wasn’t one of lone indignation. There were plenty of those: the previous year, three other women had been arrested for exactly the same thing[1]. What made Parks’ act special was that she had connections: she had been the secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP for the previous 12 years[2]. Her “spontaneous” act was followed up with 7000 mimeographed leaflets on the doorstep of every black house in Montgomery within 24 hours. The leaflets called for a boycott of the local transit system that ended up lasting for 382 days[3]. She didn’t write the leaflet, she was in jail. She didn’t distribute the leaflet. Her “spontaneous” act was the first step in a campaign that wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t been for all of her previous organizing, networking, and fighting against a terribly oppressive system. She had made herself part of another system: the civil rights movement in the US south, and it was that system that turned her “spontaneous” act into something historic.

At the same time, Mrs. Parks had spent much of her life railing against the Jim Crow laws in the US south. In her twenties, when she joined the NAACP, she spent her time trying to help other blacks to pass the special tests they needed to take to vote[1]. She had repeatedly tried to vote[2] in elections but had been turned down for some trumped-up reason. Simply put, her actions on December 1, 1955 were just another action she was taking to fight illegal and immoral laws. The difference between that one and all of the others, was that her local circle of activists was ready to run with it, and that the local political system was prone to change, at that moment.

Rosa Parks wasn’t some little old lady who had had enough one day, took a stand, and the world changed. She’d been fighting for civil rights for at least 20 years by the time she “spontaneously” decided not to get up for some other bus passenger. It wasn’t the stand she took that day that made a difference, it was the previous 20 years of work that mattered: she’d worked her ass off, she’d made connections within the movement, she’d earned the respect of others who had the power to make sure something like the transit boycott could be pulled off, and the lawyers that could fight the court case. Simply put, she’d done her homework.

I guess the thing that pisses me off is the implication that it just took someone not moving out of one section of a bus (or, as Oprah incorrectly states, sitting in the wrong section) to trigger a huge change. It wasn’t that one act that caused a huge change; it was a lifetime of the determined actions of Rosa Parks and thousands of other activists like her that made that change. When people talk about Rosa Parks decision not to get up, they ignore a lifetime of work that she’d put into the civil rights movement to that point. They also ignore the hundreds and thousands of other activists who worked their asses off, and incrementally changed public opinion to the point where the campaign Parks triggered could actually work.

So, if you hear Rosa Parks name mentioned on December 1st (the 50th anniversary of her arrest), or on her birthday (February 4), or on the anniversary of her death (October 24) don’t just think about that single act of civil disobedience. Think of a lifetime devoted to the cause of civil rights. Think of the thousands of hours she spent with other activists, planning, working, and hoping. And think of what you can do, to become one of those activists.