Open Source the Voting Machines

It's been a while since I wrote anything substantial.  This is due mostly to extraordinarily poor time management on my part, combined with an unhealthy fixation on social media *cough*Twitter*cough*which seems designed to inhibit both the writing and reading of anything longer than a double-spaced, narrow-margined college term paper paragraph. However, anyone who knows me will have heard me talk (scream is a more accurate description, probably) about the desperate need to open source the voting machines, and that is a topic which simply cannot be expressed adequately in a series of profanity-ridden tweets, no matter how cleverly constructed.  And so, here I am.

To understand what's at stake, I'm afraid I must subject you to a tiny bit of math first:

In the 2000 Presidential election, George W. Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes (2,912,790 to 2,912,253) out of a total of 5,963,110 cast in the state of Florida.  That's an ALMOST 0.01%, or one hundredth of one percent margin.  Florida is a winner-take-all state in the electoral college, and so all of that state's 25 electoral votes went to Bush, which pushed him to 271 votes, and the presidency.  If we flip the full .01% of the votes in that election from Bush to Gore, Al Gore would have won.  Regardless of your satisfaction with the outcome of that election, it should be manifestly clear that the paramount consideration in any election should be the accurate counting of every vote.

Enter the voting machine.

Theoretically, the voting machine is able to solve just this problem. It's a computer, right? It counts perfectly every time! You push the button and beep-boop it rings you up and off you go, confident that your representation in the republic is secured.  Only it isn't.  Why?

To answer this question I want to take you back in time even further now.  That time is World War II, and the object of our attention is the Enigma Machine.

The Enigma Machine was Germany's ultimate cryptography tool.  Cryptography, loosely defined, is the study and practice of securing your communications so that nobody but you and people whom you trust can read them.  There are many ways of achieving this goal, some more effective than others.  For example, take the galactically famous "secret decoder ring" found in cereal boxes for almost as long as you could find actual cereal in boxes.  It's a ring with two different listings of every character in the alphabet, one in the normal order, and one in a scrambled order, so that each letter appears only once on each list, and each letter appears next to a DIFFERENT letter in the alphabet, so that, for example, A maps to H, B maps to Q, and so on.  In order to use the ring, you compose the message you want to send, and then translate each letter in the message using the ring, replacing the normal-ordered letter on the list with the out-of-order letter.  The end result of this task is a garbled message which is opaque to anyone without the ring.  To decode the message, you reverse the translation, going from the garbled list to the normal list. When you're done, voila, there is the original message.

There are, of course, many problems with this approach.

Firstly, our decoder ring was available in just about every goddamn box of cracker jacks in the world for a while, so if little Johnny had the cash for one, your messages were only as secure as your method of transmission of the message. Once Johnny got his hands on it, (say, by beating up poor little Timmy Twaddlehammer, whom you had entrusted with the message because you knew full well his alcoholic mother didn't EVER buy him cracker jacks), the jig was up, and he'd tell EVERYONE about your crush on Susie Salamanderfeldt.

Secondly, and only slightly more difficultly, even without access to a decoder ring an examination of an intercepted message would result in noticing patterns of letters, and if you applied a bit of time and elbow grease it wouldn't take you long to figure out which letters were supposed to go where.  There are many other problems, but it should suffice to say now that a simple substitution cypher isn't very interesting, or very secure.

But Enigma - oh, Enigma was VERY interesting, and much more difficult to break than a decoder ring.  The Enigma machine was, at the time, the ultimate decoder ring.  I won't go into the mechanics of Enigma or the effort that it took to break it - if you're truly interested, start at the Wikipedia entry and then start following the citations.  It's a fascinating story.  The part of the story that's pertinent is not that Enigma was unbreakable, however - it's that the Germans BELIEVED Enigma to be unbreakable.  Their intelligence and security was a closed information system, a feedback loop which depended on and reinforced the idea that Enigma was perfectly secure.  It wasn't.  And because it wasn't, many people, including President Eisenhower, credited the breaking of Enigma with shortening WWII by as many as 2 years.

What in the hell does this have to do with voting machines?  I'm glad you asked.

The voting machines are nothing more than computers. They display a screen full of information with a way for you to interact with that information in the form of checking boxes.  If that sounds a little like a web site to you, it's not a coincidence.  Nearly everyone has interacted with the web enough to need no training whatsoever on such an interface, so it represents a perfectly logical choice for a massive deployment of technology which requires quick acceptance into the mainstream.  The mechanics of a typical e-voting machine are simple: the voting machine records the individual votes on cards with memory chips on them, and those cards are collected and then inserted into another machine, which counts the votes (in some cases, the machines themselves have modems on them which can transmit the vote tallies to a central authority, and the cards used by individual voters theoretically can be used for verification).

However, the software running on these voting machines is written by humans, and is therefore not guaranteed to be perfect.  In fact it is guaranteed to NOT be perfect, and so these machines are designed with a way to install updates on them, in order to correct the imperfections along the way.  It's a common feature of hardware systems - hell, even your TV probably does it by now (if you've ever seen a "firmware update", this is exactly what's going on), and it's made easier if your device connects to the internet, as the updates can be downloaded and applied at any time.  This is enormously convenient and a powerful way to keep improving devices once they get out into the wild - but it also represents a massive security problem.

Why?  Because it means that the software running on such devices can be altered at any time, by anyone with the knowledge to do it.  If you have the know-how it's possible for you to apply a firmware update to a TV which will cause it to be unable to tune to any channel except QVC.  Or perhaps it will randomly change channels on you; you want to watch tennis, but the TV wants you to watch Oprah.  This is clearly a bad situation, one we want to avoid at all costs, right?  So, how do we avoid it?  How do we know that the software running on the TV works, and that the update won't make things worse when it's supposed to make things better?

Here's where we go back to cryptography for just a moment longer, to talk about digital signatures.  A digital signature functions for computers similarly to the way that your signature functions for you - it's a verification that the thing which has been signed, like a contract, was looked at and approved by you.  Anyone seeing that contract will see your signature and know you approved it.  How do you know the contract wasn't altered after you signed it?  This is why you sign everything in triplicate.  It's not just because lawyers like watching us sign shit, it's to protect you from dishonest people who would alter your contract with the painter to say that you agreed to pay them $10,000 to paint the house instead of just $1,000.  Multiple copies of the contract guarantee that any changes can be challenged in court.

For computers a digital signature is similar.  A digital signature is a way of approving of the contents of a file on a computer, but it's also a way to GUARANTEE that the contents of the file were not altered, in the same way that signing a thousand copies of your contract with the painter does.  When you apply a digital signature to a file, what happens is that the entire contents of the file are scanned, and an algorithm is applied which generates a token that UNIQUELY identifies the contents of that file.  Any time the signature algorithm is applied to the same file, it generates EXACTLY the same signature.  Any time the signature is applied to some OTHER file a DIFFERENT signature is GUARANTEED to be generated.  In this way it is possible for a file to be electronically transferred as many times as possible, and so long as the signature continues to match, you are guaranteed that the contents have not been altered.  This solves our TV problem nicely.  When firmware updates are applied to television sets, they contain digital signatures which verify that the software which was generated by the manufacturer is the same software that is being applied to the TV.

And since voting machines are so much more important than TVs, you'd think that the same care is taken with the software which is installed on them, right?

Yeah, no - there's no verification of the software that's on the voting machines - it's not signed, it's not monitored in any way except by the companies which produce the machines.  What's worse, is that NOBODY outside of those companies EVER gets to see the code which is running on the machines.  The companies have, in fact, fought tooth and nail against anyone ever seeing that code, arguing that if anyone knows the code, then it will be rendered that much easier to hack.  This type of thinking is known as "Security Through Obscurity" - if nobody knows how it works, nobody can break it.  However, a famous computer security aphorism states "Security through obscurity is no security at all."

And now we reel Enigma back into the conversation - Enigma was broken, despite the lengths to which the Nazis went to keep it secret.  It relied on nobody being able to figure out the methodology by which the encryption was achieved; Security Through Obscurity writ large.  Similarly, the companies responsible for arguably the most important software in the world are using the worst possible methodologies to protect that software.  Even worse, that software has never been independently verified to do exactly what it is that's required in the first place.  There are standards, but they are terribly lax with regard to security, and obviously written by people with no clear understanding of the issues.  So, we have software running on voting machines which has never been audited, and can be changed at any time at the whim of the companies which produce them.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let's just say, for example, that you wanted to rig an election.  And let's also say that you knew the vote was going to be very close in an important state.  And all you needed to do was to switch a few votes - a theoretically statistically insignificant .01% of the vote.  With the current system in place, it is not only possible that this has already happened, it's LIKELY.  After all, what are the possible negative repercussions?  Nothing whatsoever.  Nothing is verified, and it is impossible to prove that anything went wrong, or that anything was changed, since there is NO paper trail to go along with the electronic tally in the case of a recount.  Not one vote on any of the memory cards can be mapped back to a single voter.  Not one vote on any of those cards can be guaranteed to be the same vote that was cast by the person who used that card.  Sound crazy?  It is - but this is the exact current state of American voting "technology".

You see the problem.

The solution to this is a software paradigm known as "Open Source".  Open Source is exactly what it says it is - you release the software source code, the code responsible for driving the voting machines, to the entire world, making it open to everyone who wants see exactly what the voting machines are doing.  In this way, it would be impossible for the companies writing the software to sneak in any "vote changing" code.  Similarly, it would lay bare any security flaws.  Why is this good, you might wonder?  Because vulnerabilities caught are vulnerabilities FIXED.  When the entire world is looking at your software, then there won't be a single security problem which is hidden away.  Flaws will be found and addressed before the software ever has a chance to get into production.  The most secure encryption software in the world is OpenSSL, which is the encryption software that runs on every browser in western civilization.  It's an open source project - you can download the source code and see exactly how it is that the thing is encrypting your credit card number when you send it to QVC.com to buy that set of porcelain corgis.  But knowing how it's done in no way means you can crack it.  Encryption algorithms have gotten so sophisticated that cracking the encryption would take many computers many years to break even one OpenSSL-encrypted transaction.  When security flaws are found with OpenSSL, they are published and addressed immediately.  OpenSSL has been cracked a few times, but every time this happens it is patched within a small number of days to fix it.  In this way it stays ahead of the hacker population in as much as it is possible to do this.

We must implement this paradigm with the voting machine software IMMEDIATELY.  It is utterly unconscionable that the software which runs the most important elections in the world isn't rigorously tested and shown to be fault-free before it is put into production.  Furthermore, when the software is installed on the machines, it MUST be digitally signed, and every vote which it generates must also be digitally signed so that it can be guaranteed that :

A) The software running on the voting machines at the time of the election was the same that was verified, certified, signed, and installed for that election, and
B) Every vote cast was generated with that same version of the software, to do away with the chance that a trojan horse was installed on the voting machine at the same time.

In addition, A paper trail or some other sort of hard trail MUST be available and secured in the event that an electrical disturbance takes place which causes the electronic tally to become corrupted or otherwise unavailable.  There must ALWAYS be a way to verify the vote count in every election - that there isn't can speak only to incredible laziness or a spectacular mendacity on the part of the voting machine companies.  And, by the way, Diebold and Hart Intercivic, both voting machine companies with a significant footprint in this election year, are owned by men who have raised money for GOP candidates. Those machines are currently slated to be used in 13 states, including Ohio, California, and Pennsylvania.  Why is nobody screaming about this obvious conflict of interests?  This is more important than credit cards, more important than television, more important than EVERYTHING.  It's absurd beyond measure that we don't treat it this way.

A brief note on Chick-Fil-A

Let me be clear:

In no way should Chick-Fil-A's apparent newfound sense of social justice deceive you.  When they say they're not going to give to anti-LGBT organizations any more, they simply mean they're going to do it in a way that's much more difficult to trace.  A leopard doesn't change its spots.

What you SHOULD get out of this news is that Chick-Fil-A is feeling the negative effect that their bigotry is having on their bottom line, and it's being felt to such an extent as to force their hand to try this absurd, patently transparent publicity stunt, which stands in diametric opposition to ALL of their former rhetoric, in a bid to undo the damage.  Don't think for a minute that they've changed their mind on the topic - the people running the company still think of the LGBT community as second class citizens, it's just that making money is more important to them than their theoretical Moral Imperative which they trumpeted so loudly in the past, and to which the teeming hordes of like-minded bigots flocked when it was made an Issue of the Day.  I wonder if those people are now going to stay away from Chick-Fil-A in protest, or will they continue to worship at the altar of hypocrisy?

Because it should be manifestly clear by now, Chick-Fil-A's One True God is the Dollar Almighty.

Bob Cesca On Gerlado Rivera's Show

Here's the audio (edited to remove commercials) from Bob Cesca's appearance on Gerlado Rivera's show today.  Unfortunately the entire thing is farcical, with Geraldo repeatedly calling Bob "Mr. Kreska" and Tucker Carlson making an unannounced (to Bob, anyway) appearance solely for the apparent purpose of saying that it wasn't his responsibility to... well... do anything at all really, but he sure was upset about stuff.

I'd crunch some numbers about the amount of time everyone got to speak (here's a hint: Geraldo calling the event a "debate" is wildly inaccurate), but it's not worth the effort. You can guess what it's about.

Well done, Bob.  If nothing else we have Tucker Carlson on record as saying that he thinks it's not his responsibility to get money out of politics.

And I think we can all agree, that's a good thing.

Tell Me A Story

Editorial Note : This post was originally written in 2006. I have different stuff on my reading shelf now, but my discomforts remain.  Also, someone commented that John Hinckley Jr. didn't actually go to Covenant College, but I'm leaving that in because fuck that guy, anyway.

-- GID

=================
In the house I lived in on Lookout Mountain, GA (home of "famous" Rock City Gardens, Ruby Falls, "The World's Steepest Incline Railway", and Covenant College (from whence John Hinckley Jr. graduated)), there were two yellow and blue striped (they may have blue and yellow striped, but I think the stripes were about equal size so it's hard to say) arm chairs in which I learned to read. I remember sitting in my mom's lap while she diligently tried to explain to me the purpose of the comma. That conversation went something like this:

Mom : That's a comma. It means pause.
Me : That's stupid! Why don't they just write "pause" there?
Mom : No, it means you pause when you see it.
Me : For how long?
Mom : not very long. Try this sentence.

( sound of page turning )

Me : "We should go now,"

















he said,














"and see what is left!"

Mom : A little too long, dear. Just take a quick break and then keep going.
Me : Gaaaaawwww! How can anyone ever do this right?

I did eventually master the comma, and have been a voracious reader ever since. My early heros were the science fiction giants; names to conjure with : Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury etc. I quickly moved to Fantasy : Tolkein, Silverberg, McCaffrey, LeGuin, Lewis etc. Sometimes my papa would try to introduce me to writers outside of my comfort zone, who wrote books about actual people, or at least people who could not fly, turn invisible, roar, compute, tesseract, or anything else. I enjoyed these books readily enough, but before long my nose would be down in the next book of Susan Cooper's mighty The Dark is Rising series.

To this day, sciene fiction and fantasy books maintain their status as the vast majority of my reading choices. On my shelf right now are:

1. All three of Neal Stephonson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, System of the World)
2. Frank Herbert's Dune (first time through, believe it or not)
3. Stephen R. Donaldson's new Thomas Covenant book, The Runes of the Earth
4. Christopher Moore's Lamb, a book recommended to me by no less than a dozen people, but which I must admit to not finding as funny as everyone else seems to have found it
   
5. Dungeon, Fire and Sword, the most fantasy-sounding title of them all but which is actually a terrific historical recounting of the fall of the Knights Templar in the crusades
   

Why is this? That's probably another blog topic entirely. The short, if misleading answer, is that I spend the large part of my day in a rigorous, extremely linear and logical world, getting computers to do things exactly as I want them to do them, which entails telling them exactly what that is and no more (and certainly no less), and so science fiction and fantasy fill a void. This is only partly true, however, because, and I say this with no false modesty, when you work with computers at the level at which I work with them, there is plenty of creative, outlandish, non-linear thinking to do in order to get anything done at all. Ask me sometime about what I did for 4 years in Indiana and you'll see what I mean.

In actuality, my guess is that the kinds of thinking one does in order to write fiction are very much like the kinds of thinking one does to write things which are rigorously true, i.e. computer code. You conceive an overall vision, and you keep as much of it in your head as you can while you focus on the many and varying details of implementation and execution. Sometimes it's so big you can't keep all of it in your head at once, and so you concentrate on chunks at a time, and when you get one chunk the way you like it you step back and figure out how what you just did affects the overall scheme of things. And there's no limit to the kinds of disciplines to which you can apply a creative technolgoical/philosophical/fantastical field of vision. It's the very best of both left and right brain exercise - it's why I got into computers in the first place.

Given that, then, it's amusing to note that my writing style is almost nothing like my coding style. My code is elegant, precise, minimalistic, and it always, always works. My writing, well - let's say I like to embellish, and it frequently doesn't work so well. Better to say I just outright make shit up all the time. I LOVE telling stories verbally, and when I write stories I tend to write them much like I'd speak them, with all the embellishments, side-tracking, and outright fabrications I can put in, and with WAY too many words. I overuse adjectives, adverbs, any kind of modifier I can grab a hold of I'll throw in there because I like the way it sounds when spoken. I like the rhythm, the cadence of a well constructed turn of phrase.

This is not to say this makes the best reading experience. And it's different depending on what I'm writing. If I'm telling a story about something that actually happened to me I tend to tone this kind of thing down a little bit, as I have a concrete vision in my head of the events, and so my tendancy to exaggerate can be reined in somewhat. It's when I'm writing fiction, and I'm responsible for making up everything, that the extra verbiage piles up. I've been writing the same short story for about 8 years now, and I keep bogging down because, while I have a rough idea of how I want things to go, I don't have a firm grip on the overarching structure, and no real plan of execution, and so I spend too much time being clever in dense areas of story which might be better off simply narrated so as to keep the actual story moving along. When I already know the story I'm much better at delivering.

Perhaps I should stick with memoirs.

All of this said, however, the most powerful writing experience I ever had, to this day, was in the 6th grade. My English class had a short story writing assignment; we had a week to do it, and at the end of the week we would all take an entire period to read our stories out loud to eachother. These were very short stories.

Except for mine.

At the time, I had just finished Shirley Rousseau Murphy's Children of Ynell series, starting with The Ring of Fire and culminating with the utterly stupendous The Joining of the Stone. I had fantasy and epic on the brain, and so my short story was instead a massive construction, The Quest for the Sun Sword, which came to its triumphant conclusion after a disasterous confrontation with an evil being of some type who actually wielded said Sun Sword in battle, resulting in the death of the hero's best friend, whose name, I swear to god, was Kenny. One might ask why, if the Sun Sword was such a great thing to have, did the guy wielding it in battle get his ass kicked?

But I digress.

On the day of revelation I was excited, nervous, eagerly antcipating my triumph. Our Teacher, Ginny Johnson (we all called her Ms. J., or J-Bird), went in no particular order, and so it was fate that put Georgianna George ahead of me in the queue. Now, I could go on a long time about Georgianna George. She was a country girl in a middle class elementary school, but she pretty much out-did everyone around her in pretty much everything - smart, interesting, and I was smitten with her from the start. I think she first came on the scene during 4th grade, and so I had 3 years of unrequited grade schooler passion as a backdrop to this moment.

Georgianna's story was short, simple, and had everyone gripped instantly. It involved a scientific researcher exploring a distant planet, and upon coming across an alien construction of some sort the researcher begins to try to decipher the ruins, only to be torn apart by the beast lurking within. Her description of the ruins were tinged with enough of the familiar to make you think you knew what they were, but shadowed with enough of the alien to make you wonder what you missed. As she read the final paragraph the room was dead silent. She described tendons popping and the horror of the researcher's last moments as she felt her back breaking, just before she died. And then the final blow.

"With a start, Sharon woke from her bed, crying. It was only a dream."

It was only a dream.

Inasmuch as it is possible for 6th graders to become spontaneously riotous, this is exactly what happened after a stunned, disbelieving silence. Miss George delivered her perfectly written story perfectly, with all of the timing and sensibility of a real writer. And at that moment I realized that what I had written was, in fact, crap. And no amount of, well, anything would ever change that. Of course I was next, and when I refused to read my crap Miss J. threatened me with receiving an F for the lesson. Despairing, I waited for the bedlam to abate, and, finally, began my tale. It was too long, it wasn't very original, and the class clearly lost all interest after about 2 minutes. After Georgianna George's triumph, I felt smaller than small; worthless; a cheap bullshit artist. I ground down to my inevitable conclusion, and received the same smattering of applause that everyone else had gotten.

Everyone but Georgianna George, who as a 6th grader scared the absolute shit out of everyone in the room, including Miss J. I never felt any animosity towards miss George - far from it, in fact. What she did that day only fueled my ardor for her (an ardor which was never requited, alas - in fact, to say that I was unlucky in love as a grade schooler grossly understates the matter); it was inconceivable to me that I should think poorly of someone who wrote such a great story

But it took a long, long time after that before I ever wrote anything else. And I'm sure that, on some level, I am always feeling that feeling of knowing that I'm really not a good writer, and that my epic, convoluted story lines disguise a lack of any real talent for worsmithing. So, to answer the request to "Describe yourself as a writer", I say this:

I want to have the same effect on a room full of people that a 12 year old girl did 30 years ago.

Is that too much to ask?

This I Believe

It's too long for the NPR series by the same name, but it remains true none-the-less.  I'll be interested to hear any commentary.

-- GID

------
I self-identify as an atheist. I also tell other people I'm an atheist. But I'm not. Not really. It's just that what I believe about the nature of the divine isn't easily expressed in terms of a single symbol, or even a bumper-sticker-length catch phrase. So I fudge it a little bit, but as far as most people are concerned, it's close enough.


The thing is, I approach the question of god in the same way I approach questions I come across in computer science : logically, methodically, always with an eye on the fundamental principles which can be used to solve every problem I've come across so far. Computer Science consists of learning a set of basic skills, and using them to construct complex systems which can do things like simulate the collision of galaxies. The end result may be stupendously sophisticated, but the path is always built using the same blocks you learned in your freshman CompSci class. What you learn is really a WAY to think about big problems, and not a WHAT to think. You learn to break things down into smaller and smaller parts until you get a piece you know how to cope with, and then you work on that. If you keep doing this, you eventually can solve everything, given enough time, patience and discipline.

So, here is my thinking on god.

God is given 4 aspects : Eternal, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient.

Eternal : God has always existed, and will always exist. There is no point at which God has not existed. God is the sum total of the past, present, and future.

Omnipotent : God is all-powerful. This doesn't just mean that God has all the power in the universe, it means God *is* all the power in the universe. God is the mover of all things, the stopper of all things, the cause, source and destination of every action. You cannot say God didn't cause the hurricane – this means that some other power did, which means that there's power in the universe outside of God's, which violates God's Omnipotence. God is the mover of the heavens, the burning in the suns, the metamorphosis, the photosynthesis, all processes, all energy.

Omnipresent : There is no place God is not. God is in old candy wrappers and on the moon; God IS the moon, and all the space between the moon and the Earth; God IS the Earth; God is in every molecule, every atom, in all of the universe, God is located in them all. God IS them all.

Omniscient : All knowledge is God's. The reason for all things is known by God. All possible outcomes of any given set of potentialities are known by God.

Most atheists will tell you that an entity containing all of these aspect doesn't exist. The thing is, I can think of exactly one. It's the only possible entity that encompasses all of these concepts, and I know for a fact that it exists. What is that entity?

The universe.

Call it “everything,” if you like. All-that-is. The infinite Unity. The sum total of all places at all times and everything that happens therein. We live in it, with our limited life spans, so we are part of it – part of God. The divine lives in all of us – we live in the divine. God is everywhere, so that means I'm part of God, and God is part of me. God is every-when, which means last Tuesday, tomorrow, and right now. God is every action, which means all that I do is expressing the divine. This is crucial : the divine is an expression of my self. God knows everything, which means all that I know, and a whole lot of stuff that I don't. But I'm reaching for it. The knowledge is out there somewhere, if I have patience, discipline, and curiosity enough to ask, and can overcome the fear to take the risk.

So what about Jehova, Allah, Baal, Zeus, and so on? Maybe they exist, I don't know. But I know they aren't God. If they do exist, they're nothing more than super-powerful entities with their own limited lifespans, their own limited understanding, and their own limited power. This puts them far ahead of me on the food chain, so maybe they can affect my life. But it seems to me that if Jehova is up there toying with us all, and he has a plan, and he's proceeding according to his own whim without regard to our desires and dreams, then that's not benevolent, that's just being mean. And if his purpose for me crosses my own desires for my life, without reason or explanation, then he's nothing more than a pathetic bully for doing it. And we all know this truth from our childhood : bullies rule through fear, not love.

In fact I find the idea of a God like this thoroughly depressing. The very idea of it pales in my heart, in comparison to the possibility that we're all responsible for one another, that we're supposed to be taking care of one another as best as we can. For in the end, WE are the ones expressing the divine – and the divine does not express itself to us except through the actions of others. So if we are evil, then God is evil; if we love and care for one another, then God truly is love. There's no external bogeyman forcing you to make the decision, or threatening you with punishment if you aren't good. YOU are the one responsible for how you exist in the world – it's your own power, your own knowledge, your own actions that creates God every moment of your existence.

For if you believe in Jehova, or Allah, then make no mistake about this : what you express through your belief has nothing to do with your God, but with YOU. If you hate homosexuals, it's not because God does, it's because YOU do. If it's your opinion that women are inferior it's not because God thinks this, or because it says so in your scripture, it's because that's what YOU think, and you're using your religion as an excuse, as a crutch, as a way to disavow responsibility for your own actions. Conversely, if you love everybody, and reach out to others and do good things, then that's not Jehova, that's YOU being a good person. YOU are the benevolent God. You need no proxy to claim your goodness, you ARE your own self-expression.

So, my question to you is this : How do YOU express God to others?

The Death of Things That Spin

The CD/DVD is dead.  Or at least, it should be.

I know, Blu-ray won the format wars.  Now we can all get behind this great new format and watch our videos in beautiful HD.  But I'm wondering - why are we supporting any kind of mechanical-based format any more? 

Let me explain.

Way back when, there were LPs.  LPs were great, analog, and very specifically limited to a known degree as to how much information they'd hold (i.e. roughly 45 minutes of sound).  You put the LP on a rotating platter and dropped the needle, and sound came out of the speakers based on the amplified micro-vibrations of this needle.  The quality of the final result relied largely on several known factors : the quality of the needle (<Steve Martin>Moon Rock needle.  Sounds like shit.</Steve Martin>); the quality of the amplifier; the quality and power of the speakers.  It was a simple idea carried out with varying degrees of elegance, if the vast available array of these supporting technologies is any indication.  I still have LPs, (but no turntable), and will admit that there's some undefined, nostalgic instinct which is driving me to keep them. 

Next came the digital era, with the sound further discretized into 1s and 0s, and essentially glued, again, onto a plastic disc.  But still the medium of delivery relied on a mechanical device: a much smaller, much faster turntable.  DVDs, both the first generation and the new blue-ray versions, are exactly the same - we just got better at making the bits we glue onto the plastic discs really, really small so we can put more and more bits on the same sized plastic disc.  More bits means more data means higher fidelity sound or video, all of which is well and good.

But it's not all that good.

I can tell you for fact that the things-that-spin method of data delivery is no longer either practical or necessary.  I can't recall the last CD/DVD drive I bought for a computer which lasted more than 3 years.  Hell, even DVD players only last 4-5 years and then the things explode in some fashion.  Most last significantly less time than that.

This is horribly inefficient, not to mention that it creates a lot of extra trash when people buy a $30 DVD player from Wal-Mart every 18 months, including all the packaging (box, styrofoam packing materials, unread manuals, etc), and then throw all of it away and do it again.  I'd love to know what percentage of space in a typical landfill is dedicated to the dessicated remains of things-that-spin technologies. 

On the other hand, a typical thumb drive (also called flash drive) holds about 32 GB these days.  This is WAY MORE data than you get on one dual-layered standard DVD.  Hell, you could put FOUR standard-def DVDs on the thing.  There are no moving parts required to access this data.  The amount of packing for these drives is a fraction of what's required for LPs/CDs/DVDs, and there's nothing to break.  Imagine buying a thumb drive with Wall-E on it.  You pop it into the slot on front of your player, and INSTANTLY your menu screen comes up.  No waiting for the drive to spin up, no wondering when the thing is going to break.  Neither the player nor media has any moving parts to cause any issues.  Drop the thing on the floor all you want, it won't break.  You can't scratch it.  And storing it takes up a fraction of the space the DVD did.

Even better, this same thumb drive ALSO has the soundtrack on it.  You get into your car, pop the drive into the front of your audio player, and listen to the soundtrack as you drive to work (or, if you want to, play the move audio and watch it in your head as you drive).  No waiting for anything to slide in and out of any slot.  No hoping the thing spits out that old Thompson Twins CD that's been stuck in there since 1994.  And no mechanical parts at all, so no skipping.

But what about the new Blu-ray discs, you ask?  Aren't those supposed to hold more data? 

Indeed they are.  A single layer Blu-ray disc holds about 25 GB, a dual layer 50 GB.  You'll recall, the more data I can store on my media, the higher fidelity I achieve, and so the better my listening/viewing experience.  As is the general rule with computers, however, the technology is advancing with harrowing speed.  As I said, you can already buy 32 GB flash drives for $30, enough to hold more data than a single layer Blu-ray disc.  And while this is too much to spend on a DVD, there are two things I can promise you with absolute certainty:

1) This is a HUGE profit margin.  These things cost probably around $5 or so to manufacture en masse no matter how much data they hold.  In the same way that you can now buy an 8 GB flash drive for about $8 (which is a little cheaper than the cost of a normal DVD now), in a few months there will be higher capacity flash drives available, and the top-of-the-line drives available now will cost almost nothing. 

2) These new drives are already ready to go, the manufacturers are simply waiting for the right time to hit the market with them so that they can maximize their profit margin on the current version before they make them the new old version.

So, the technology exists to make this a reality already.  It's nothing more than mule-headedness which keeps us using these idiotic things-that-spin. 

However there's even more benefit to solid state media - it can be re-written infinitely.  So what, you ask, who cares?  Well, if you get tired of the Rocky collection, you can simply buy the Rambo collection and replace the old Rocky movies on the same media.  You waste nothing (except the time and brain cells you killed trying to re-enact the wrestling scene between Balboa and Thunderlips from Rocky III), and don't have to be embarrassed while trying to dump your old collection on Craig's List.

But, even better, take the following scenario:

You have an old media style which is permanent.  Suddenly, a new technology is available which allows you to store more data on a different kind of media.  Now, suddenly, your huge library of old-media entertainment is obsolete.  You'll have to buy a new player and host of new media to get the advantages of the new technology.  Your old media and player becomes landfill fodder, and you spend tons more money you didn't want to to own something you already own.

Now let's pretend you have re-writable solid state media.

You have a huge collection of 20 GB media iGimmicks (tm).  Some of them hold a movie and its soundtrack, others hold a few different versions of your favorite musical.  You plug them into your player, which checks out the contents and brings up the appropriate interface for allowing you to experience your data. 

Suddenly, it is announced : new compression scheme available, higher fidelity, better sound, available now!

Worst case, you don't have an internet connection.  You take your media and iGimmick player to your local iGimmick retailer (you were going to have to go to the store anyway to buy the new player and media, so this isn't actually imposing additionally on you at all).  Hand them your player and box full of iGimmicks.  One by one, your iGimmicks are plugged into the upgrader.  The upgrader looks at the media, sees what you have, and converts or upgrades, as needed.  You now have the newest version of your stuff, same media, no garbage generated.  While all this is happening, they also install the new version of the player software on your iGimmick player (for the record, called iSprocket).  It may be that your storage capacity, in some cases, isn't enough to hold the newest version of the item in question (you are obsessed with Cats, alas, and have every version ever produced on one of your iGimmicks).  No problem.  You can upgrade that particular iGimmick to the new higher-capacity version, and continue to use the old one for something else.  Would you like to check our stock of available media which will fit on that model of iGimmick?  We have a lovely selection of Equus home videos...

Or, if you're like us and have high-speed internet in your house, all of this can be done without you even having to leave the living room.  Your iSprocket is internet ready, and can tell you when new versions are available.  It downloads and installs the new player software automatically, and lets you convert your media as you sit there in your own home.  Those iGimmicks which can't be converted, take them to the iGimmick store, they'll hook you up.

This scheme works for more than just movies and music.  Any data can be handled this way.  Software (new version of GTA, anyone?), books (Robert Jordan series coming right up!), you name it.  iGimmick can handle it, with all the same advantages.

So let's review.

Solid-state media (thumb drives, and other similar technologies which have no moving parts) is cheap to produce, cheap to buy, generates less waste from packaging, doesn't break under normal circumstances (you still shouldn't put it in the microwave), does entirely away with player-based mechanical failure and hence decreases waste further by not clogging landfills with old broken players, takes up a fraction of the space of traditional disc-based media, is almost infinitely upgradeable without wasting media or delivery systems, and can be implemented immediately with existing technologies.

What the hell are we waiting for?

How to Fail at Art While Really Trying

My brother is an architect and designer.  His entire life he's had an amazing ability to draw just about anything with stupendous detail.  He's also able to disassemble shit and put it back together again with ease - he just SEES things so clearly, and is able to translate that vision from his brains to his hands.

Me, not so much.

In fact you might say my abilities in both of these areas is, ah... impractical, at best.  I'm not bad at taking things apart, but it's 6-5 odds against my getting them back together again and functioning properly.  My limitations in this regard led to my two Theorems of the Conservation of Stuff:

1) If you take something apart and put it back together again, you will always leave one piece out, but the thing will still continue to function perfectly normally.

It should be noted that, through repeated practical application of this theory, you can take a thing apart and put it back together enough times such that it will no longer have anything in it at all, and yet it will still continue to function perfectly normally.

2) If you unpack a suitcase and repack it, there's always one thing which just won't go back in no matter what you do.

It should be noted that, through repeated practical application of this theory, you can unpack a suitcase and  repack it enough times such that it will be completely empty, and yet you cannot pack anything into it at all.

It was my failure to master any sort of artistic endeavor, perhaps, that led me into the computer sciences.  No drawing required, and my ability to translate what I'm THINKING from my head to my hands appears relatively intact.  Couple this with a keen tendency to focus an unholy amount of attention on one thing at a time, and it makes for a good coder, and, later in life, a good systems designer.  But it does NOT make one any better at drawing.  And, being as I've always admired my brother for this ability of his, I decided, in my senior year of college, to attempt to better myself in this regard.  For all intents and purposes, we will call the class I attended "Drawing For Complete Morons".

I was actually very excited to purchase the required materials for DFCM.  Pens!  Pencils!  Charcoals!  Gigantic Paper Pads! Fixatives!  I felt as if an entire new world was opening up, with an arcane language all its own, and I was going to be indoctrinated into a cult of magic practitioners.  No longer would I bear the shame of my overly developed left-brain-hemisphere - I was going become an arTEEST!  Take THAT, Pascal!  Kernighan and Ritchie can kiss my ass, thank god almighty, free at last!  And so I arrive at the very first session of DFCM, backpack bristling with the implementations of my upcoming transmogrification.  I am ready for anything.

The first thing I realize is that nobody else has brought anything but a few pencils and a Gigantic Paper Pad.  I don't feel too badly about this, as I'm a total, complete philistine, and I know going in I'm starting with nothing - anything I do wrong I'm going to chalk up to this and keep forging ahead.  I plotz myself down and try very hard to affect the extreme, almost pathological indifference everyone else in the class seems to manage effortlessly, but I'm so excited that I keep breaking into smiles, all the while looking around at different people, not wanting to catch their eye, trying to figure out their major.  After ten minutes of what seemed to me to be an unbearable buildup, the professor finally arrived, and he's got with him an enormous box of, of... of STUFF : kitchen utensils, dinnerware, handheld yard tools, and the like.

At this point I experience my first real pang of discomfort.  Holy crap, I can't even draw with a pencil and you want me to try to compose something with an EGG BEATER?  Have you lost your fucking MIND, man?  What am I gonna do, fucking make you an omelet that looks like the Mona Lisa?

But no, the idea, as the professor explains, is simple.  Pick whichever of these things speaks to you.  Pick whichever implement you have with you that you like, and do your best to draw it. All I want to do today is to see where everyone is, so I know how to structure the class.  Well, shit!  That seems perfectly reasonable, let's get to it then!  I expect there to be a mad dash to the box, as there would have been had you thrown the same challenge to a room full of CompSci majors for whom social skills are not particularly manifest, but everyone is well behaved instead, bordering on that disinterest that fascinates me so.

It is at this point that my left-brain-hemisphere starts to assert itself : I don't want to tip my hand, as it were.  I know I suck, but I don't want EVERYONE to know that I suck.  So I need to pick an implement which isn't going to be impossible for me to draw, which isn't also something imbecilic like a straw, but that might give me some small chance at showing that I do indeed have some untapped genius simply waiting for the right small appliance to come along to allow it to reveal itself to the world.  The guy in front of me picks the egg beater (show off), I pick something that looks like a long handled colander in miniature, or an enormous tea strainer, with a leather thong tied to the end of it, presumably for hanging.  Not too complicated of a device, I think to myself, I should be able to manage this.  So I sit down and begin to sketch.

The pad I'm drawing on is quite large, 18x24, so this is going to be, by a considerable margin, the biggest drawing I've ever attempted.  My enormous tea strainer is nothing like as large as the pad, so right away I'm experiencing difficulty getting the scale right.  First the handle is too long for the size of the strainer part (wad up, throw away).  Next the strainer part is gigantic and I don't have enough space for the handle (tear up, throw away).  Then I get the bright idea of starting in the middle, but that also ends poorly (tear up, wad up, throw away).  Forty five minutes into a ninety minute class and I've got nothing to show.

The fucker next to me, meanwhile, has loosely sketched about the most beautiful god damn garden trowel I have ever seen.  He's using a pencil, but he's got so many shades of grey I can't believe he's not cheating somehow.  The fucking REAL TROWEL doesn't look as real as the one that's on the page.  This is when I get my second pang of discomfort.  There is no way this ends well for me.  It is at this moment that the professor starts to stroll around the room, starting, thankfully, on the other side, to see how we're doing.  So now I've got to really start humping it.

As the professor slowly wends his way around the room, I just totally disconnect my left brain.  I remember a quote about something or another that says to make a statue of a horse, cut everything away from the block that doesn't look like a horse.  I'm not sure how it applies to my current situation as I've no scissors, but it makes me feel better. I calm down, and begin to sketch.

The professor alights behind the guy next to me, pauses for a moment, and breathes "Very nice!"  But me, I'm focused, a drawing machine, totally In The Moment.  I barely register the professor standing behind me for what must be at least a minute.  And then I hear it, at last, the affirmation I have sought my entire life:

"What are you DOING?!"

The tones are unmistakably horror-struck, bordering on hysteria.  Left-brain-hemisphere takes total control again, and I snap out of my trance and see what I have done.  What I see is, without question or fear of contradiction, a gigantic penis, caught in the act of ejaculating.

This isn't to say I meant to draw a gigantic penis.  I MEANT to draw the little-big tea strainer.  But picture it : I have a large, mostly round bulbous thing with scribbled lines which are meant to be the strainer net but instead looks like pubic hairs.  Attached to this I have a large handle with knobby bit at the end onto which the leather thong is attached, only it looks like... well, it looks like a gigantic penis with a bulbous (circumcised) head with a little hole at the end, and out of the hole is shooting a liquid of some sort.  And given the painfully tumescent condition of the handle, with regard to the over all scale of the thing, it is not likely to be urinating.  No man I ever knew could urinate under that particular circumstance.

"I," I respond, "have drawn what appears to be a gigantic penis.  I swear to you I'm trying to draw this tea strainer thing here, I'm just... just... I'm really awful."

"Well," says the professor, "At least you know it.  How could you improve this drawing?"

Left-brain-hemisphere starts talking, then, and I can't shut it up.  I don't even try.

"Well, aside from it's a gigantic penis, it's just all out of proportion.  Nothing is the right size.  And I can't draw a perfect circle so the strainer rim looks all wrong.  And I tried to get the little ridge at the end of the handle but then made the two sides of handle on either side of the ridge different sizes.  And then there's this business with the actual strainer material, which I didn't have the first idea how to manage so I tried to sort of abstract it out, otherwise it would have, if you can believe it, looked even worse.  I'm afraid I can't explain the leather thong at all."

The professor nods, thinking to himself for a moment - I'm pretty sure he's trying very hard not to laugh.  I, on the other hand, am trying very hard not to cry.  "Well, at least you can SEE what's wrong, and that's a good start."

"Am I allowed to burn it?" I ask

"Not in here," he says, and walks on.

I never went back to that class.  I went directly from the doorway to the registrar and dropped a class for the first and only time in my entire life.  I NEVER give up on an academic subject, but in this case it was clear to me that I should circle the wagons right away, circle tightly around the wounded little animal comprising my right-brain-hemisphere, quivering with embarrassment and shame.  I avoided that building for the rest of the semester.

To this day I am a miserable drawer-of-things.  I stand in complete awe of people who are really good at it - the entire process is an utter and complete mystery to me.  If you want a new distributed security system designed and implemented from the ground up, I'm your guy.  Just don't ask me to try and draw a picture of it for you.  We will both be sorry.