Reality Check

Reality check. I haven't heard the phrase for years. It's gone out of style in this age where politicos aver "We are creating a new reality". But now at the New Year's, it seems a good time to check reality and to make sure it's still there.

Here is a sidelong glance at two very real trends.

For the last 40 years and for the forseeable future, the cost of transistors is halving every two years. This may be the most powerful force affecting the world today.

This interesting principle is called Moore's Law. It says that today's computers can do twice as much for the money as computers did two years ago. Telephones also. It costs less and less to send data.

As the time it takes to finish a job decreases, the quantity of computing can increase. One can do more here, more there. One can do it ever more cheaply. On and on into the future.

This perpetual increase in quantity permits a continuing improvement in the quality of computing. My freeware Firefox browser, for instance, recently acquired the ability to put individual sessions in tabs. Each Firefox icon at the bottom of the screen now can have many sessions going. My computer performs ever more complex tasks.

The increase in computing quality touches us in many ways. It has given us a "mute" button for television that puts the text of what is being said on the screen. It has given us automobile maps on computer screens that know where we are. It has given us cellphone cameras that can capture police misbehavior. It has given us YouTube. It has given us wearable RFID tags.

What kind of future will this endless increase in computing quality create?

We will be known. The border to our private self will be ever more tightly defined, our secrets held ever more closely. Our public self will become our icon.

We will never know for sure what is known about us. We may make laws requiring the government to tell us anything it knows about us. We cannot guarantee that someone, somewhere, is not building his own database about us, someone terribly deranged.

Invisibility is not an option.

Governments and corporations will be allowed fewer and fewer secrets. The capabilities of the press for oversight and auditing will double every two years.

The cost of learning any particular thing will become trivial. Education will become free.

As civilization is skewered on this spike of perpetual info systems growth, it is about to be roasted in the sunstorm of global warming. Chicago will become the new Rio, Hudson's Bay will become a summer destination, and large numbers of people will die as the ocean rises.

Some island homes have already been lost.


Intercept the info trend with the labor market. People who can think well seem to make increasingly better money. Stoop labor remains oversupplied. Intercept it with romance. If you marry someone smarter than you, your kids will be better able to support you in your old age.

Intercept the info trend with government. Words like "accountability" and "transparency" begin to echo down the marble hallways. "Cost-benefit analysis" can't be far behind. Meritocracy may soon be ours.

Intercept the info trend with global warming. As it gets hotter and hotter, we will know more and more about it.

Intercept global warming with the real estate market. Buy real estate in Duluth.

Jesus Superstar

Give most adults two drinks and ask them whether Jesus is Santa for grownups and they will seriously ponder the question. For many grownups and even some kids, Jesus is the invisible friend who never goes away, like Santa, always watching. They set the voice of Jesus as chief among the inner voices that tell them what to do. It gives them control.

Granted that there was a person born 2007 years ago who spent his years from age 12 to 30 among the Essenes, the Sufis of the time, a people who made a science of spiritual practices. Granted that his followers taught a path so radical that 11 of the 12 primary disciples were martyred by the powers that be. Granted that their followers created a new organizational order, with churches linked by message and messenger, hidden in the crevices, distributed rather than centralized. A newer, more democratic order.

What we have made of Jesus reflects our needs. Just as what we have made of Saint Nicholas reflects the needs of children.

If we need Jesus to be strong and reassuring, Jesus is strong and reassuring. If we need Jesus to be warm and enfolding, Jesus is warm and enfolding. If we need Jesus to be militant and vengeful, Jesus is militant and vengeful.

What children learn from Santa Claus is that they have the power to believe. They believe in Santa for a few years. As they grow, they learn to distinguish theater from reality and faith fades into reason. At this point many of them are introduced to Jesus and are told that if they can have belief, they will have Jesus' presence in their lives. If they can conjure up belief, they will have their savior.

On top of the politics, on top of the personal self-delusions, sits a spiritual message that Jesus taught, ignored but serene.

Man is holy.

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Original blog entry edited and polished a bit 12/31/06. DM.

The Virtual PC Is Here

A four dollar CD can free you from Windows forever. According to Slashdot.com, one fellow is calling it an "Internet Freedom Disk".

You boot your computer from the CD drive. This bypasses any rootkits on the hard drive, any viruses, any worms, any keylogging programs.

No history is kept in the computer of where you go online or what you do. (Your Internet Service Provider may track that, however.) If you get the DVD version, you can use Skype to make phone calls that you know are going nowhere but where you want them to go.

Booting from CD gives the ultimate in secure computing.

Your operating system can never be overwritten by a virus. It's pretty well debugged, because it's Linux. The version I am using is as evolved as Windows or more so. The differences are trivial. You know what's there, because it's Linux.

Not one, but three companies release these discs. The most highly recommended version seems to be Freespire, a descendent of Linspire, formerly Lindows. Ubuntu also provides a bootable CD. The one I am familiar with is Knoppix.

I'm readying now a Knoppix disk for a friend whose Windows machine had a classic head crash on the directory in the hard drive. With this disk, he will be able to restart his PC, copy pictures from his camera into a jump drive, burn CDs and cruise the web.

He may be able to salvage some files from his hard drive, depending on what is left of the directory. If the drive is not a total loss, he can reformat it from the CD, skipping the bad sectors, and, if he likes Knoppix, install that on the reformatted drive. A broken Windows machine becomes a working Linux machine. For $4.00.

I got my Knoppix 5.0 DVD from a magazine in Borders Books. More and more, new Linux editions seem to be distributed this way.

A year ago, I built a small computer that could be devoted to Linux. I installed SUSE Linux from the "SUSE Linux 10 for Dummies" book. I discovered sadly after installing it that it couldn't connect with the DSL provided by SBC. So I haunted the magazine rack, buying and trying FreeBSD, Mandrake, Mandriva and Linspire (got that for a penny on a promotion) and none of them knew how to connect to DSL all by themselves, nor could I find out on the web how to make them do this.

Then came Knoppix. As soon as it booted, it checked this strange ethernet thing plugged into the computer, and Eureka! It knew what to do with it. I had DSL.

In order for it to boot the first time from the CD, I had to press my keyboard's DEL key at startup and tell the setup program to change the boot drive search sequence so that the machine would look first at the CD drive and then at the hard drive. I pressed F10 to exit and the machine booted in Linux. Faster than in Windows.

A fine Linux it is, too. The Knoppix CD has a plethora of programs - 1.9 gigabytes uncompressed. The dvd has even more. When you press the button in the lower left corner a long, long list of programs appears.

Booting from the CD does prevent me from bookmarking my favorite sites. If a program needs to save its startup parameters, it can't. Maybe I can tell Linux to save this information on the little jump drive. I don't know how yet.

You can install Knoppix, if you like it, onto a hard drive. Installed on my hard drive, Knoppix has a package installer that I can use to update individual programs and install new software.

I have not yet been able to initialize the TV card on my Linux machine in Knoppix. This may be a wiring problem. There are several other little clinkers that I hope will disappear as I learn more. Portable media needs to be write-enabled, for example.

You can create your own bootable CDs with a subset of the Knoppix CD if you like - make a standard set of tools for the company or for the department. Eliminate the software overhead in one fell swoop.

While the operating system on CD is intrinsically secure, it desecures the Windows system of the machine on which it runs. From Knoppix you can read Windows files.

You can create an audit CD with a script that lets you copy particular Windows user files from a computer to an external hard drive for review. A policeman, a company spy or a blackmailer can do the same.

Windows users can protect against such invaders by going into set-up mode (DEL, F8, or F12 at startup) and adding a password there. Even a person booting from a CD will need to know this password.


This new twist in technology has profound political implications. Individuals needing secrecy can now visit a wi-fi hotspot, boot up their laptops to a CD, and converse over encrypted internet telephone with no chance of interception.

The right to freely assemble, at least over the internet, has become a global right.

Windows Open

Government is increasingly being revealed as the management system of the powers that be.

The "infosphere" - a shared abstraction of the world around us that is everywhere all the time (mostly) - surrounds what was and insists on accountability.

Dwellers in the infosphere attack ever more perspicaciously, with cellphone cameras and messaging, blogs and wikipedias, the flaws in the system.

Curiosity devours fear.

Freedom is life without fear.

Shadows In The Light

The State Department recently asked the CIA for names of Iranian nuclear scientists who could be sanctioned and the CIA refused to give them, saying that it needed to protect its sources and tradecraft, and anyway, it has a large workload.

State then set a junior officer to find them on Google, and he did. One wonders if the CIA also had found them on Google but did not want to admit it.

The CIA may be hurting themselves by such denials. Will State call them the next time they need something fast? Will other departments discover that they can get what they need more quickly from Google than from the CIA? Will Google obsolete the CIA?

As the cost of storing and transmitting information approaches zero, all information will tend to go everywhere. The more public a piece of information is, the more it will tend to attract critical comment and the more the truth of it will be known. The truthfulness of secret information such as the CIA provides becomes in comparison only one side of the story.

For State to replace CIA reporting with Google searches almost makes Google a branch of government. Our intelligence collection process is outsourcing itself. Hard to resist when there is no cost.

Accepting Loss

Breaking up is so hard to do.

Some of us are destined to love forever anyone we ever loved. It's the way we are.

For us it is easy to understand Mr. Bush's grief at seeing the world he created in Iraq now judged worse than Iraq under Saddam Hussein, at seeing his loyalty to his generals not rewarded by their competence, at seeing history already beginning to dissect his mental processes and failing to glorify his heroism. The poor man had such hopes.

He cannot quite realize that it is all over but the deconstruction.

Sometimes relationships get like that. Stalemated.

Neither party can make a move. Anything you say gets you in deeper. You can't let yourself leave the relationship, because you don't want to take a loss.

Refusing to accept a loss keeps you in the game and losing more.

He cannot quite realize that the game plan is to let him live out his two more years in the presidency while that institution itself is carved back down to a manageable size. By being in the presidency, he will be living proof that it needs to be controlled.

The power of the office will shrink to match his competence.