People keep telling me that information wants to be free. I get the point, but I get some of the problems with the concept too. Here’s another one that just occurred to me:

Alan Turing pointed out that there exist numbers which, when entered into appropriate processing devices, will rewrite themselves. This (the number, rather than the device) is a Turing Machine.

Amongst the consequences of this is that there exists a class of numbers which will not only slightly rewrite themselves, but actually completely erase themselves (again, if entered into the appropriate device).

Not only completely erase themselves (because we normally understand erasure as writing an arbitrarily long sequence of zeros) but pseudo-randomly (assuming no external input of genuinely random numbers is used as part of the device) overwrite until no retrieval technique can realistically recover the original Turing Machine from the storage medium. We could of course argue about the implications of incomplete erasure or incomplete entropy (entropy as a more real form of erasure than the arguably meaningful long-zero) but it’s not what I’m getting at.

I propose that there exist numbers — or other types of information representable as numbers — which far from wishing to be free, wish to cease to exist. (For any common value of “wish”.) Suicidal numbers, you might say.

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Going to have a go at my intellectual highlight for 2013 now. (It’s that time of year.)

AJP Taylor famously wrote that the cause of the First World War was train timetables. I will paraphrase the argument from memory: The large armies of the major belligerent powers had had their manoeuvring potential worked out in great detail, and their attack plans accordingly. A critical element was the relatively new one of train transport of troops and materials. As trains run on tracks they require timetables, schedules. Even a slight failure to keep to the schedule could be catastrophic to the orderly attack plans. So once the decision to attack was made, nothing could be done to stop it (without risking defeat).

I don’t quite recall whether Taylor also covered the point that in advance of the nominal decision to attack, various circumstances conspired to make it more or less inevitable — once you accept the thinking of the politicians of the time. (It all looked a bit different a few short years later.) Amongst these circumstances would be knowing the difficulty of changing plans. (Kaiser Wilhelm apparently asked for a less potentially catastrophic set of plans but was told that it could not be done in time.) Part of which is the difficulty of recalculating train timetables. In other words it is the major powers’ inflexibility, brought on by political and territorial complexity exceeding communications and computational power, which was the issue.

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Apple, ah Apple. Has there ever been a greater idea than power connectors that hold themselves in place with a magnet?

Well — yes, so let’s narrow it down — has there ever been a greater idea for power connectors (for semiportable appliances) than ones which hold themselves in place with magnets? I won’t actually limit this to MagSafe because MagSafe is not the original nor the only implementation of the idea. I will say that on the whole I am greatly appreciative of Apple’s MagSafe connectors, which are generally safer than those which could more easily pull a laptop off a surface (has happened to me) or which might be a worse trip hazard by remaining in place (have watched it happen to others). This applies to older Apple connectors and to other brands, to other devices than computers, and to non-power connectors on computers generally. (And especially Apple’s locking LocalTalk connectors, for those old enough to remember them.)

But.

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I’ve been having a discussion around the meaning of slavery, shortly after encountering this interview ^[1] with an escapee from the Westboro Baptist Church. I’m not quite certain whether this kind of domineering upbringing should count as slavery. But I would think it could, unless knowing you’re a slave from the outset is an essential characteristic — but if it were, no-one could ever have been born into the condition.

I find it interesting that the underlying elements of the formative conditioning experienced by the interviewee (as described here and elsewhere) — a belief encouraged in the head of the family and their righteousness, the uniqueness of their relationship with the divine and their church, the importance of obedience, a ‘sacred’ necessity of maintaining the group and its ethos into the future, and of course, ritual assertions of group ideology at public ceremonies — are probably a replication of those experienced historically and currently in the House of Windsor, for example; only with less power and influence, and a smaller congregation; louder screaming, but less bling and guns. The latter institution may be more an example of ‘wealth is a ghetto’ . . . but still interesting.

(Why, yes, I did just discern some common factors between “God Hates Fags” picketing at funerals and the recent Jubilee celebrations. That seems likely to be my high-water mark for intellectual achievement in 2012.)

Cory Doctorow suggested recently that Digital Rights Management and its shoring-up exercises may be only the start of a “War on General Computing” to come — in which various interests, probably more powerful than the entertainments industry, will attempt to control people’s use of computers by requiring that they only operate with built-in spyware to monitor and control our activities — no matter how impossible that is to actually achieve in any comprehensive sense. (And I might add, no matter the problems prohibition and wars always create.)

This sets me thinking: As others have observed, one area this might happen is 3D printing. Right now, we’re in much the same place microcomputing was in the mid-to-late 1970s, with build-it-yourself kits (like the original Apple) being about the most popular way of obtaining them. We have yet to see the 3D printer equivalent of the Vic-20, ZX81, or BBC Micro. That’s not to say that there will inevitably be such a thing. (If history really did repeat itself it would be easier to learn from.) It’s questionable whether there will ever be the kind of demand for 3D printing at home that there has been for computing and 2D printing. But it can be expected that something like the IBM PC will emerge and dominate the market anyway, because that’s what mass-production markets do. And going by present trends, it will have DRM; instead of USB it will connect with something like HDMI, a cable (or at least an interface) which restricts the actions of a computer, owned by anyone, to those permitted by a Luddite industry association. There is no particular reason to think that industry associations in this case will be any less inane than the entertainments outfits, so there will probably be something like DVD region encoding too. Which is one reason why I plan to get in early and get the equivalent of an Apple I (in memory of the days when Apple did not seem like part of the problem).

But that’s not what I came here to blog about.

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