Monday, January 30, 2006

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Here are my dorkbot slides.
Jennifer | 11:37 AM
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Thursday, January 26, 2006

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Carla's pictures from dorkbot.

Flickr's pix.
Jennifer | 11:37 AM
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Monday, January 23, 2006

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Nerd Salon is a regular gathering of geeks and friends in which alcohol is consumed, puzzles are solved, interesting people talk about bizarrely technical topics, and hanging out is accomplished.

Our inaugural event will be a collective toast- and dance-fest in honor of ultra-nerd event CodeCon. Our plan is to invade the all-mashup nightclub Bootie at Annie's Social Club. Join us!

Date/Time: Feb. 11 starting at 10:00 PM.

Where: Annie's Social Club, 917 Folsom at 5th St.

For future Nerd Salon parties and announcements, join the mailing list.
Jennifer | 5:25 PM
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Sunday, January 22, 2006

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I'm speaking at dorkbot this Wednesday.
Jennifer | 10:21 PM
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Friday, January 20, 2006

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For more on statistics, false positives, and mass detection systems, here's an article by J.A. Paulos from the Temple University math department.
Jennifer | 10:15 AM
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We got a new mac a few days ago. Brad, historically a PC user, was elated at how easy it was to set up.
Jennifer | 10:09 AM
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

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The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society is collecting stories about problems with locked cell phones to support our request to the Copyright Office for an exemption to the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions for cell phone unlocking:

If you have a good story, know someone who does, or are aware of a community of people who might be interested, please send the link to them.

Thank you.
Jennifer | 11:17 AM
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Eric Rescorla, on the topic of the effectiveness of mass surveillance.
Jennifer | 10:52 AM
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My third column in the series on my obsession with the illegal wiretap scandal is now up on Wired. Its called Mass Spying Means Gross Errors.
Jennifer | 10:33 AM
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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

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From Cass Sunstein's blog:

The legal questions raised by President Bush's wiretapping seem to me complex, not simple. Here is a rough guide: (1) Did the AUMF authorize his action? (2) If not, does the Constitution give the President inherent authority to do what he did? (3) If the answer to (1) or (2) is yes, does his action violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)? (4) If the answer to (3) is yes, is FISA constitutional, or is it inconsistent with the President's inherent authority? (5) If the answer to (1) or (2) is yes, does the wiretapping nonetheless violate the Fourth Amendment?

Its only complex because he asks the questions in a confusing order. Reorder them (3, 1, 2) and its simple. Does the action violate FISA? Did the AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) authorize violations of FISA? Does the Consitution give the President inherent authority to disregard FISA? (Whatever the answer to this question, there's no need to consider (Q4) whether FISA is constitutional. Even if the President has inherent authority, FISA can be constitutional, except where it purports to limit the President). That leaves the admittedly more complicated question of whether the President's alleged inherent authority to wiretap citizens during a durationless war violates the First Amendment. But that's ivory tower land, since the answers to the first three questions are so simple.
Jennifer | 2:02 PM
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Update on Kafka on the Shore.

I just finished reading it. Here’s the IM I had with Sarah Imber Safdar about it.

Warning: spoilers

JSG: just finished Kafka on the Shore
JSG: you are right
JSG: it doesn't make sense
JSG: or as murakami would say
JSG: it makes sense, but only if you don't try to put it into words
JSG: the question is, is that a cop out, or is it true
JSG: its true for wind up bird
JSG: but I'm not sure I think its true for this one
JSG: you?
10:15 AM
SIS: what?
SIS: let me read that again
SIS: no it doesn't make sense - it's definitely a play on oedipus right
SIS: so he's oedipus doing the things that oedpius does in an equally fantasmical world
SIS: but different
SIS: at the end of oedipus, he's destroyed by his fate
SIS: in this book, he's sort of not redeemed - he feels as if he must suffer his fate, return to the real world
SIS: so he's oedipus at the end too
JSG: he accepts his fate by committing the offenses
JSG: and he thinks that will save him
JSG: but it doesn't fully work
JSG: he has to forgive his mother
JSG: and accept that he/Crow can't defeat his father
JSG: even then, he just has to go on living
JSG: so its a bit of a twist, but he's neither damned nor saved at the end
SIS: http://mason.gmu.edu/~oarans/oedip-story.html
SIS: mom abandons, kills dad, screws mom later, pokes out eyes at end in anagnosis (epiphany of horror) and then goes into exile
JSG: hmm
JSG: the father's eyes get poked out in the end here
JSG: weird
SIS: they do? I forgot that
JSG: crow attacks the man in the silk hat with the flute
JSG: he just keeps laughing
JSG: in the woods, near the v. end
SIS: oh yeah - what is up with that flute and the souls of cats?
JSG: murakami = obsessed with cats
JSG: who knows why
JSG: cats know things
SIS: obsessed with spaghetti
JSG: dogs don't
JSG: obsessed with ears!
SIS: there are several references to japanese literature that I don't know throughout the book, I bet there's a soul cat thing in one of those
SIS: i think that the boy/girl librarian is like the sphinx
SIS: passing the test of the sphinx takes him to the place where he can go between realities
JSG: he can go between realities because nakata opened the stone
SIS: also the kafka thing - I don't have the kafka story he references in my kafka compilation, so i don't know if it's a real story or not
JSG: the sphinx is bad and oshima is good
JSG: I don't know that kafka story either
SIS: i don' t think oshima is good - i think oshima is neutral
SIS: nakata is good, and sad, damaged
SIS: why does nakata have to open the stone and what ultimately does that part have to do with kafka?
JSG: there's little connection between them
JSG: they live in the same neighborhood
JSG: johnnie walker lures nakata to him to kill him
JSG: he needs nakata to jumpstart whatever plan he has for messing with kafka.
SIS: that's interesting
JSG: but otherwise, there's nothing between kafka and nakata
JSG: but wind up bird is similar
JSG: there's the story of what happened to people during the war
JSG: and it somehow continues to haunt present day people
JSG: but how is kind of hard to say
JSG: though nakata wasn't fucked up by the war, necessarily
JSG: so this book is really weird
SIS: i thought it was like this: kafka's mom grieving the death of her true love trades her affection for the opportunity to go between places to find that love and the johnny walker spirit guy doesn't ever give her that opportunity, in the meantime she has children and she abandons the boy, but keeps the girl, who vanishes almost completely from the story
SIS: the question is why is the johnny walker guy so cruel to cats and why does he want to die?
SIS: this is the part that I think I might understand better if I knew more about Japanese literature
JSG: as a plot device, the cats are the way he lures nakata
SIS: the johnny walker guy is similar to noburo wataya in wind up bird
JSG: yes, connected to power
JSG: dark
SIS: nihilistic
JSG: but in wind up bird, noburo pulls the dark thing out of Creta Kano
JSG: and here, nakata pulls something horrible out of hoshino
JSG: in wind up bird, the main character also rearranges the rich women's chi
JSG: again, weird

So now you have it, I thought the book was weird. Actually, I really enjoyed it. It hangs together more tightly than Wind Up Bird, but that also makes it feel more contrived. The reason I am obsessed with Murakami is I think he's trying to make the reader feel the connection between darkness and light, the difficulty in telling the difference between the two, and the importance of not ignoring either.
Jennifer | 11:13 AM
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Wednesday, January 04, 2006

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Tonight, I was listening to the BBC and a reporter asked the United States Ambassador to Iraq about a new Bush Administration plan to stop funding reconstruction projects in Iraq. The ambassador denied that this was a change in policy. But in 2003, the reporter pointed out, Bush said that Iraq would have the best infrastructure in the region. Yes, the ambassador responded, but he didn't say the United States would pay for it.

Honey, by the end of the year, you'll have the biggest diamond ring on the block.
Jennifer | 10:50 PM
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My Wired News column this week is entitled "Go Back to Afghanistan, Hussy".
Jennifer | 8:35 AM
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