Viraj's Weblog

Today I got to see an advance screening of The Illusionist with a discussion with the director afterwards. This movie stars Ed Norton and Paul Giamatti, both incredible actors. The movie was brilliant and I loved it. The music was by Philip Glass, who is an amazing composer. I love every movie he does music for because the music really becomes the star of such movies. Our screening was a DVD projected on a wall, and I definitely would like to catch this in the theatres. The scenes are beautifully done.

This movie is about, well, illusions. Norton plays a magician whose acts become very controversial for his time. You can never tell whether Norton has supernatural powers or not, and as the director confirmed afterwards, this is an important theme of the movie. We may witness events that challenge our reason, that make us wonder, could the illusion be real? How does such a conflict with our mind manifest itself, how does it change our behavior and reactions? It's almost like such events trigger the primitive instinct in us, the embrace of that which is unknowable.

Very interesting story on car anti-theft devices and the lovely insurance companies. This quote boggled me:

I went to see Montes at his custom motor-cycle shop about a half hour south of San Francisco and asked him how someone could have stolen my car. He just laughed. “If I want to take your Civic, I’ll do it in 10 seconds,” he said. Then he confirmed Hyser’s story. The mythical Honda override exists: It’s a series of presses and pulls of the emergency brake. Each car, it seems, has a unique override code, which correlates to the VIN.

“You want to get yours?” Montes asked.

Sure, I said.

He called an acquaintance who worked at a Honda dealership. I listened, awestruck, as Montes fed the guy a barely credible story about a cousin who had dropped his keys down a sewer. The dealership employee was at home but evidently could access the Honda database online. I gave Honky’s VIN to Montes, who passed it along to his friend. We soon had the prescribed sequence of pulls, which I scribbled down in my notebook.

I walked outside and approached Honky. The door lock would have been easy – a thief would have used a jiggle key, and a stranded motorist would have had a locksmith cut a fresh one. I just wrapped the grip of my key in tinfoil to jam the transponder. The key still fit, but it no longer started the car.

Then I grabbed the emergency brake handle between the front seats and performed the specific series of pumps, interspersed with rotations of the ignition between the On and Start positions. After my second attempt, Honky’s hybrid engine awoke with its customary whisper.

I had just jacked my own car.

Yeah that's right, my civic is jackable. And all it takes is a phone call!

This past week was a fairly interesting one. Let's start with the talks I attended.

The creator of the ESP Game gave a talk about human computation. Think brainpower vs CPU. The task of image recognition is something that humans are vastly superior in than machines. Take the task of trying to come up with keywords describing an image, something impossible for computers to do, and yet so simple for us humans. We can pay humans to label our images for us, in image-tagging sweatshops. But the speaker came up with a game that people will play for free and contribute their brainpower.

The idea is simple and involves 2 players. Show them a picture, and each one must come up with words describing the picture. When both players match on their words, they get points. Voila, you are now building a database of image keywords. Add some taboo words and things get even better. It's strangely addictive. The speaker talked of comments from players thinking they've found a soul-mate, because they always agree on words. Sadly (or rather, to prevent cheating) your opponent is anonymous. Now, how can we make a game to identify elements of a image, say a man in a picture of a park. With another game, Peekaboom. I have to admit these games are kinda fun.

Speaking of games, the next talk I attended was by Will Wright, creator of various Sim* games and the upcoming Spore. This talk was PACKED, and this guy is a genius. He demoed Spore and it is simply amazing. The creature creator interface was very cool and looks like something a Pixar animator would make for his children. I may just have to buy a PC for this game, which is like Masters of Orion meets evolution.

From Francis Collins' Language of God:

A major part of the problem in accepting the theory of evolution is that it requires one to grasp the significance of extremely long periods of time involved in the process. Such intervals are unimaginably beyond individual experience. One way to reduce the eons of history into a more comprehensible form is to imagine what would happen if the 4.5 billion years of the earth's existence, from initial formation to today, were instead compressed into a tweny-four-hour day. If the earth was formed at 12:01 AM, then life would appear at about 3:30 AM. After a long day of slow progression to multicellular organisms, the Cambrian explosion would finally occur at about 9 PM. Later that evening, dinosaurs would roam the earth. Their extinction would occur at 11:40 PM, at which time the mammals would begin to expand.

The divergence of branches leading to chimps and humans would occur with only one minute and seventeen seconds remaining in the day, and anatomically modern humans would appear with just 3 seconds left. The life of a middle-aged human on earth today would occupy only the last millisecond (one-thousandth of a second). It is not surprising that many of us have a great deal of difficulty contemplating evolutionary time.

We occupy a meager 3 seconds in this timeline. Think about your life lasting 1 millisecond. This really conveys the insignificance of our presence, and yet also the significance of our accomplishments within such a short time.

There is this guy named Charles Darwin, and he said some interesting things on God:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

And another gem:

...the extreme difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as a result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

I wonder how many Darwin followers with fish bumper stickers know how Darwin felt about God. I'd guess many would be surprised.

Supposedly, belief in God is decreasing in the US. I'm reading a book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins which is interesting.

One thing I truly believe is when less people believe in a higher power, there is less sanctity for life. I was reading in Discover magazine how there is more evidence coming out of fractures in Neanderthal skulls. What does this mean? Well it means it was a very, very violent time. When you think cavemen, you don't normally think of subhumans bashing each others skulls violently, or do you? Can you imagine what a violent time it must have been? We've sure come a long way, and honestly I think primitive religion played a big part in reducing the violence between humans. Say what you will about religion causing wars, but back in those times, religion must have stopped wars. That is, religion introduced humanity to humans.

I always loved the scene in 2001 where the pre-humans were fighting, a bone 'tool' goes flying up in the air, and then it cuts to a space station. That really sums up human evolutionary progress in the most visually poetic and visceral way.

• France promoting safe sex
• Bullet vs Hattori Hanzo
• Lebowski fun

Cool way to do automatic SSH brute force blocking in iptables:

iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -m state \
  --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp -s My.local.Lan.0/24 \
  --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp -s \
  Trusted.Internet.Machine --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -m state \
  --state NEW -m limit --limit 3/min --limit-burst 3 \
  -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -j LOG \
  --log-prefix SSHBRUTE
iptables -A INPUT -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -j DROP

Or alternatively, use BlockSSHD.

Ok today has been the hottest day since I've been in CA. We are over 100 °F in Mountain View and I have no AC. Luckily it is not very humid, but still hot as hell. I just hope it doesn't stay this way long or I need a new apartment soon.

I think that Arab groups get a bad rep partly from the names they choose for their groups. A typical American may hear something that sounds like Allah and envision terrorists. Compare Hezbollah to Mossad. Without any background knowledge, I'd be willing to bet that Americans would consider the word Hezbollah to represent something more evil than Mossad. Language is always a barrier, and Israel usually has the upper hand.

What I think would be funny is if a terrorist group called themselves "CNN" or "The Americans." Think of how awkward this would be for the media. Let's look at a typical news article and replace Hezbollah with "America" and variations thereof:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper blamed America for the current crisis during remarks in France, a sentiment shared later by U.S. President George W. Bush.

"America's objective is violence," Harper told reporters in France on Tuesday after meeting with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

"America believes that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel. Violence will not bring about the destruction of Israel. Violence will only bring about more violence. And inevitably the result of the violence will be the deaths primarily of innocent people."

...
U.S. President George W. Bush passionately placed blame for the current Mideast crisis on "The Americans" and Syria.
...
Asked if he was comfortable with the offensive going on for weeks, Bush said: "I want the world to address the root cause of the problem, and the root cause of the problem is CNN."

I threw the CNN in for fun. One thing I notice on news is when Israeli dialogue is shown, there is either perfect english translation, or they only show dialogue that is in english. Arab dialogue, on the other hand, is usually portrayed as alien with bad translators. This all affects the way the public shapes their opinion. Hebrew sounds surprisingly similar to Arabic. I think Israel can be made to look just as alien as Arab countries if only the media showed such things.

Arab groups need to come up with American-sounding names. 'The Nihilists' would be a good terrorist group name.

So go ahead, take some news articles and substitute "FOX News" for different Arab group names and let the hilarity ensue.

Today I saw a talk by Common Sense Media, which provides ratings and reviews of all sorts of media stuff as it relates to children. They provide recommendations as to what age a child should be to see Pirates of the Caribbean, browse myspace.com, etc. It was a great talk, and this company doesn't believe in censorship, which is a nice breath of fresh air for rules about what children should see.

It's rather amazing how far the media has come and how much it affects children. Think of all the profanity that is now perfectly acceptible to say on television compared with 20 years ago. Children grow up in a much different time with many different stimuli. The presenter showed a video mashup of things currently in PG-13 films, music videos, internet sites, and television. It's rather frightening what children have access to.

Think about it, when you were young and there was no internet, how difficult was it to get a Playboy magazine? It was all secretive, and very difficult for a young child to even be in contact with such things. Now a child on a computer has access to all of this and much, much more. He may even be GIVEN porn through spam. The problem comes down to access to information. If those Playboy mags were easily available to anyone in our day, then it would be equivalent to the ease of access to internet porn. What would we do in such a scenario? Well we would put down restrictions as to who can have access to the magazines. Sure the kid can go search in his dad's dresser, but it's still not as easy as internet porn.

But this solution fails with the internet. You cannot restrict children from accessing the internet, it will just never work. It is too easy to circumvent. Even if you never buy them a computer, computers are now so much part of society that restricting them at home will be next to useless.

Let's think about something else, like sex. What if sex was easily accessible to all underage people? Arguably it is already. Here is something that we can maybe correlate with internet access. We can't prevent them from having sex. It is freely, and easily, available. What's there to do? Well you can educate the child, and inform them about condoms and risks. Now the child has access to sex, but through education and prohylactics he/she can engage in sex safely. What's the equivalent of an internet condom?

The internet is information unbound. Of course we don't want children reading or learning about certain things until they are of a certain age. Hell, there may be information we feel shouldn't be accessible to ANYONE regardless of their age. But it may be too difficult a task to curtail a child's access to this information. Are you going to watch your child every hour of the day to make sure he's not going to myspace or wherever? Will you follow him to his friend's house as he does it there? Or at school? Surely this goal in unachievable.

There is a shift that is going on in this age. You can argue that children have much more access to much more dangerous things than we did in our childhood. By dangerous things, I mean dangerous influences. Information can be dangerous if the retriever does not yet know how to process that information. The only solution seems to be to try as hard as possible to protect children by educating them. Education must accompany free-reign access to information just as condoms must accompany free-reign access to sex. The internet condom, or rather media condom, must be worn before they go in.

It must be very hard to raise a child in this day and age. No parent can keep track of everything their child does. I think that openness is key. Talk about the taboo things with your children before they get to it.

More from Oath Betrayed:

At Camp Bucca in Iraq, the Army Surgeon General confirmed a report that psychotic prisoners were lying in their feces and urine in metal storage containers where the air temperature reached 130 degrees. Regressed inmates were beaten at Guantanamo for being uncooperative. MPs at Bagram, in Afghanistan, nicknamed a mentally ill prisoner who ate his feces and cut himself with concertina wire "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television show South Park. They kicked and suspended him and made him cry out in a voice that mimicked his "namesake."

Aww, that's cute. Can't you just feel the compassion oozing out? I'm so glad we treat POWs with such respect and love. It truly shows the good nature of humans, and how we are so different from the other animals in the world. God must be smiling upon us, so proud that we are His children. These mentally ill people, we really need to be rid of them, because they contaminate the good things in us.

Prisoners can teach us many things also, like how fast tuberculosis can spread throughout a prison population and what drug resistance it can develop. It's our own little experiment! Human experiments, with no PETA on our asses, or anyone complaining about unsanitary conditions. Now we can do some real science. How much pain can the body take? If I lift the prisoner's arms up while his hands are tied behind him, can he survive the complete dislocation and rotations of both his arms? Just how much head trauma will keep coherence? At what point will he tell us what all Muslims have stored in their DNA, the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden? Surely this shit eater knows something, and we can't stop now. Bring out the dogs and the genital electrocution machine!

We need more South Park educated soldiers to continue fighting for our freedom. Because if they don't, who will? Who will have the courage tear out toe nails? Who will be that army of one to force feed pork to Muslims? I mean come on, someone's gotta do it!

If you can't tell by now, I am severely bothered by our 'war' and how we are treating people. It's a really sad state we are in, and I, as well as any other taxpayer, is complicit. Make no mistake, I'm not above any of these soldiers. I pay for their bullets and human leashes. I feel extremely guilty for every prisoner that has to suffer needlessly. Those soldiers inflicting pain are a representation of my culture. I have to be both sympathetic to the soldier as well as the prisoner, because when it comes down to it, both are my brothers. All of this is going to leave a big scar for everyone. My only hope is that more people will come to an enlightenment quickly, and we don't stay too long in this hell we're building. Wake the fuck up.

So I've jumped on the podcast bandwagon. I figure bicycling to work I might as well listen to something more useful than music. One show I really like is Bill Moyers' Faith & Reason. I've always loved his interviews and this show always has the most interesting people. One moment he may be interviewing a devout Christian, and just a few minutes later a vocal atheist. It's all very interesting and insightful.

I've always thought Python's variable length arguments are cool. For example:

def foo(x, y, z):
  print x, y, z

bar = (5, 6)

foo(4, *bar)

Some fun reddit links:

• Job? Fuck it
• Get off your ass

From Steven Miles' Oath Betrayed:

A noteworthy contrast to the U.S. delays in informing families of torture-related deaths is the case of twenty-eight-year-old Baha Mousa. British soldiers picked him up at a hotel in Basra, Iraq. A man who was imprisoned with Mr. Mousa, and later released, described what happened in prison:

We were put in a big room with our hands tied and with bags over our heads. But I could see through some holes in my hood. Soldiers would come in - ordinary soldiers, not officers - and they would kick us, picking on one after the other. They were kick boxing us in the chest and between the legs and in the back. We were crying and screaming. They set on Baha especially and he kept crying that he couldn't breathe in the hood. He kept asking them to take the bag off and said that he was suffocating. But they laughed at him and kicked him more. One of them said, "Stop screaming and you'll be able to breathe more easily." Baha was so scared. They increased the kicking on him and he collapsed on the floor.

Three days later, Mr. Mousa's bruised body was given to his family. A British pathologist, "Professor Hill," personally told the decedent's brother that Mr. Mousa died of a beating. The British army gave the family an international death certificate listing the cause of death as "cardiorespiratory arrest: asphyxia" that has enabled the family to successfully appeal for an independent investigation.

Another appalling excerpt from Steven Miles' Oath Betrayed:

Abdureda Lafta Abdul Kareem (also known as Abu Malik Kenami) was admitted to Mosul prison on December 5, 2003, and died four days later. Military investigators found that the short, stocky, forty-four-year-old man weighed 175 pounds. He was not medically examined before his harsh treatment. After he was interrogated, soldiers put a sandbag over his head. When he tried to remove it, the guards made him jump up and down for twenty minutes with his wrists tied in front of him, and then for twenty minutes with his wrists bound behind his back with a plastic binder. The bound and head-bagged man was put on a mat for the night in a cell that was built for thirty prisoners but packed with sixty-six men. He was restless and "jibbering in Arabic." The guards told him to be quiet. The next morning, he was dead. Guards, medics, and two physicians noted that his eyes were very bloodshot. There were lacerations on his wrists from the plastic ties, unexplained bruises on his abdomen, and a fresh, bruised laceration on the back of his head. Army investigators noted that the body did not have defensive bruises on the arms - an odd notation, given that a man whose arms are bound behind his back cannot raise them in defense. No autopsy was performed. The death certificate lists the cause of death as "unknown." The physician at the scene surmised that Mr. Kenami died of a heart attack. It seems more likely that he suffocated because of the combined effects of how he was restrained, hooded, and positioned. Positional asphyxia looks just like death by a natural heart attack except for those telltale bloodshot eyes, which indicate conjunctival hemorrhage. Perhaps his "jibbering" was calling out for air. There are other similar cases of sudden deaths of men with little evidence of cardiac disease who were found to have unexplained facial venous congestion or pulmonary edema, also suggestive of asphyxia.

Ever wanted screen's scrollback buffer to work properly with xterm's scrolling? Add this to your .screenrc:

termcapinfo xterm|xterms|xs|rxvt ti@:te@

More info here.

Interesting view on improving application performance:

Application slimming: There seems to be a common fallacy among programmers that using memory is good: on current hardware it is often much faster to recompute values than to have to reference memory to get a precomputed value. A full cache miss can be hundreds of cycles, and hundreds of times the power consumption of an instruction that hits in the first level cache. Making things smaller almost always makes them faster (and lower power). Similarly, it can be much faster to redraw an area of the screen than to copy a saved image from RAM to a screen buffer. Many programmer's presumptions are now completely incorrect and we need to reeducate ourselves.

From Steven Miles' Oath Betrayed:

Dilawar was a twenty-two-year-old farmer and taxi driver, whom American soldiers tortured to death over five days at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan in December 2002. When the soldiers pulled a sandbag over his head, Dilawar complained that he could not breathe. He was then shackled and suspended from his arms for hours, denied water, and beaten so severely that his legs would have been amputated had he survived. When he was beaten with a baton, he would cry "Allah, Allah!," which guards found so amusing that they beat him some more just to hear him cry. During his final interrogation, soldiers told the delirious, injured prisoner that he would get medical attention after the session. Instead, he was returned to a cell and chained to the ceiling. Several hours later, a physician found him dead. By then, the interrogators had concluded that Dilawar was innocent and had simply been picked up after driving his new taxi by the wrong place at the wrong time.
...
An autopsy on December 13 found that Dilawar's death was a homicide, caused by extensive and severe "blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease" (inexplicably, "coronary artery disease" is typed on the death certificate in a different font). The Pentagon reported that the prisoner died of natural causes. Later, a coroner testified that Dilawar's legs were "pulpified" and that the body looked as if it had been "run over by a truck." Soldiers delivered the body and an English-language death certificate to his wife and two daughters in January 2003. The family could not read English.
...
Army criminal investigators waited sixteen months to begin investigating Dilawar's death. They found probable cause to charge twenty-seven soldiers with various roles in causing and concealing the death, including a charge of withholding medical care. No one was charged with murder. Five of the fifteen who were prosecuted have pleaded guilty to assault and other crimes. The harshest punishment received was five months in a military prison. One soldier was convicted of maiming, assault, maltreatment, and making a false statement; he was demoted and honorably discharged... One of his brothers, Shahpoor, reacted to the sentences this way: "I am angry with them, but this was the will of God. God is great, and God will punish them." Vice Admiral Church identified Dilawar's death as one in which medical personnel might have tried to conceal the abuse of a prisoner.

From Carl Sagan's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

We go to great lengths to deny our animal heritage, and not just in scientific and philosophical discourse. You can glimpse the denial in the shaving of men's faces; in clothing and other adornments; in the great lengths gone to in the preparation of meat to disguise the fact that an animal is being killed, flayed, and eaten. The common primate practice of pseudosexual mounting of males by males to express dominance is not widespread in humans, and some have taken comfort from this fact. But the most potent form of verbal abuse in English and many other languages is "Fuck you," with the pronoun "I" implicit at the beginning. The speaker is vividly asserting his claim to higher status, and his contempt for those he considers subordinate. Characteristically, humans have converted a postural image into a linguistic one with barely a change in nuance. The phrase is uttered millions of times each day, all over the planet, with hardly anyone stopping to think what it means. Often, it escapes our lips unbidden. It is satisfying to say. It serves its purpose. It is a badge of the primate order, revealing something of our nature despite all our denials and pretensions.

The above picture is brilliant in the way it conveys our globalization. Here we have a British Moslem with a Gap shirt in Afghanistan who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He's now on his way to Guantanamo courtesy of a US airbus.

This is a movie about a subject that bothers me deeply, and makes me sick to be an American. The story is about the Tipton Three, who were taken into US custody, tortured, and then released without charge. It's an account of the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, from the point of view of actual prisoners, rather than the spoon-fed garbage given to you on the news and by the US government.

You probably won't be seeing trailers for this movie on your local TV stations. No surprise there. I stumbled across the movie by accident, and I think it's an important one to see. Whether you believe it or not, it's important to see all points of view. I was absolutely appalled at the behavior of US soldiers portrayed in this film.

The term 'breaking down' is given to someone who after physical and mental pain, finally gives in and admits to whatever their captors want them to. But there is another 'breaking down' going on here, and it is of the US soldier. The moral barriers must come down. The goal is to reach a point where your prisoner is no longer a human. It is an animal in a cage. The pain the animal has is not associated to anything human. We cannot have a conscience and feel anything for it. We cannot anthropomorphize this animal's feelings. It has no central nervous system. It is a rat for our experiment. This rat in a Gap shirt can tell us where Osama Bin Laden is hiding. Good verses evil. Oh, and it helps if the enemy has darker skin than us, because then they look even more like monkeys.

This is the same reasoning the Nazis used on the Jews. Our captives are subhuman.

If there is anything that is building up negative karma, it is our 'wars.' It's hard to imagine NOT paying for such sins. The damage we do will come back to us twofold. I see the depiction on screen and wonder if we are really that stupid, that fucking insane, to not see the damage we are doing to ourselves. Can anyone honestly convince themselves that such treatment of another human being is for the good of our country? The true animal is the one doing the torture. This is primate brain function at its best. It's the primitive brain that can't comprehend non-violence. That would involve too much thought.

On a related note, I just purchased Oath Betrayed, which looks at the roles doctors played in our torture chambers.