Friends

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designing_society_for_posterit.html

(Continuing from the comments/discussion following an earlier post ...)

Generation starships: they're not fast.

If you can crank yourself up to 1% of light-speed, alpha centauri is more than four and a half centuries away at cruising speed. To put it in perspective, that's the same span of time that separates us from the Conquistadores and the Reformation; it's twice the lifespan of the United States of America.

We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different.

Consumer capitalism along our current model simply won't work as a way of running a long-duration generation ship (the failure modes are lethal and non-recoverable). Communism (or rather, Leninism) has a slightly better prospect, but is still a long way from optimal. Monarchism is just a pretty word for "hereditary dictatorship supported by military caste". What are the alternatives? And what do we need to consider when designing a society that can survive for a 500-1000 year voyage in a bottle without exploding? (I'm assuming, for the sake of argument, that suspended animation or life extension technologies don't change the picture out of all recognition; after all, even if you can expect to be alive in a thousand year's time when you reach Barnard's Star, you're not going to get on the ship in the first place if the living conditions are intolerable.)

Designing a space habitat/generation ship with the implicit parameter that the crew are expected to work 40-60 hours a week is a really bad idea; efficiency is the enemy of redundancy, and multiple redundancy (in life support and propulsion) is absolutely vital to any such project (because it provides resiliency that is essential to have any hope of recovering from a disaster). What if the population crashes? If you've designed your ship to require a 40-hour work week by 1000 maintenance crew and you're down to 250 crew, you're going to die. A 10-hour work week, in contrast, gives them a fighting chance of survival in event of a major die-off.

A sensibly designed long-duration hab would require the crew to do just enough work to maintain the necessary skill set (you don't want them to go rusty), but leave lots of time available for education, recreation, and socialisation. You can't build a stable hab culture on material acquisition because it has to function in a resource-bounded environment (although soft goods/intellectual property is another matter, if you want to provide an escape valve for acquisitive urges, or a "training wheels" environment for the market-mediated culture that you might need to revive after arriving in another solar system).

I've been (inconclusively) batting around some ideas with Karl Schroeder — how do you design a society for the really long term? There are a couple of levels to consider: notably, decision-making and economics. And it doesn't look as if we've got any good solutions to either.

Administration first: Democracy is prone to mutation into some other form (kakistocracy, oligarchy, populist dictatorship). Monarchy has a single point of failure and historically only worked when there was a draconian enforcement regime backed up by Malthusian pressure (whenever the lid came off — e.g. with the opening of a new frontier for emigration — the oppressed tended to vote with their feet: aboard a generation ship, their only option would be to vote with the knife). We were somewhat intrigued by the idea of a society with multiple designed-in local attractors, so that over time it can oscillate between different modes of governance (but returning eventually to previous patterns); but nobody's tried it yet.

Another issue to consider is the need for designed-in escape valves. The social pressure on a generation ship is going to be fierce; but if there's a designed-in expectation that, say, 20-50% of the inhabitants at any given time will be preoccupied by non-functional distractions such as the arts or sports, that might go some way to defusing social stresses. Arts and sports can act as vectors for social competition and status-seeking, while being channeled easily in directions that don't consume excessive physical resources.

One thing I'm pretty certain of is that the protestant work ethic underlying American-style capitalism, with its added dog-eat-dog ethos, would be a recipe for disaster aboard a generation ship — regardless of whether it's run as a democracy or a dictatorship. American (or British) working hours are a bizarre cultural aberration — and a very local one. More to the point, competitive capitalism tends to reward increases in operational efficiency, but efficiency is most easily optimized by paring away at the margins — a long-term lethal threat to life in this situation. The "tragedy of the commons" has got to be engineered out aboard a generation ship, otherwise the residents will wake up one [virtual] morning to discover someone's acquired a monopoly on the oxygen supply. And that's just for starters.

(Finally, don't get me started on libertarianism. Economic libertarianism -- in the contemporary American sense -- aboard a generation ship would be just plain suicidal. It's dog-eat-dog capitalism with the brakes off; I'm of the opinion that libertarian ideology is based on a falacious theory of mind, and would in practice degenerate rapidly into a rather nasty form of industrial feudalism. The end point of which is monarchism, and bloody handed revolution. Not the kind of metastable multiple-attractor society I have in mind at all ...!)

So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror? (NB: communication with the home world is assumed, as is the ability to implement any innovations they come up with that don't require a work force greater than 10% of your people.)

http://www.snopes.com/fraud/distress/valentin.asp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091111.html

Where can a telescope take you?

Today I learned (or rather, was reminded) that rear-view mirrors have this cool spring-loaded mechanism so that when they’re pushed forward, they just go BOING back into their original location with no harm done.

Entirely unrelated (honest!) I need to replace the left rear-view mirror on my bike. It currently looks something like this:

The crack happened when I was trying to pop the mirror off its frame to try and get at the bolt underneath, because it had gotten really really loose. You can see the temporary measure I’ve employed in the meantime in that picture of course.

A man who says he endured slashed tires and death threats just before he became rural South Harrison Township's first black mayor is stepping down.
Charles Tyson announced Monday that he would leave the township council today, in part, because he said he is worn down by racism.
Tyson had already given up his position as mayor of the town of 2,700.

bluejersey

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7570&rss

I have a line on a job that involves porting some code that was originally written in R, then in Delphi, and now the researcher wants it re-written in C++, turned into multi-processor/multi-computer friendly (using MPI?), and turned into a plug-in for R. The program as it is now is pretty primitive – he apparently just puts a bunch of parameters into the actual Delphi code then recompiles and runs, and it outputs into a data file. Obviously the first step would be to have a wrapper program that gets the parameters from a data file, and later a wrapper that gets the parameters from however R passes them to plugins.

It’s been a while since I used C++, and the language has changed a lot since then. Name spaces, STL, Boost, auto_ptr, all this stuff is new to me. It’s going to take some frantic reading to get up to speed. Even worse, I have to read the existing code, which means learning a bit of Delphi/Pascal. And I’m going to have to find a decent IDE for C++ – although the consensus on StackOverflow seems to be to go back to the way I’ve always worked until I started using Eclipse last year: gvim, make, gdb, and a web browser open to the man pages.

Even better, the job would mean working from home. The dogs will be happy about that.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

http://www.snopes.com/photos/military/gebhardt.asp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091110.html

The other side of Saturn's ring plane is now directly illuminated by the Sun.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the axe falls.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7567&rss

• "I'm wearing a pink dress to school today, mom." (courtesy denny)

• Sponsor a bat! (courtesy txtriffidranch)

• Medical marijuana in California.

• NO SKINNY CHICKS!

• NotN: Goldman Sachs "doing God’s work"; Murdoch announces plan to cut off nose (guest post by deathboy).

Sunday I went to the Pembury with nyecamden. He fed me. The new laptop and its remarkable lightness attracted much attention.

This evening I went to a museum computer people meetup that got slightly overwhelmed by Wikipedians. Productive and good, I think! Photos to come, if we ever find the XD-card reader. We refrained from entering the pub quiz, it really isn't fair to let Wikipedians into those.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7564&rss

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/still_on_the_road_sort-of.html

I'm back home today and tomorrow, but off again on Thursday to Novacon 39 in Nottingham. Oslo was about as cold as Edinburgh, and about as dark; although a good time was had by all, all this rushing around in the dark is leaving me somewhat tired, and even a portable battery-powered daylight lamp for dealing with SAD (which has begun hitting me earlier and harder with each passing year since I turned 40) isn't helping much. (No surprise, if you bear in mind that I live 50 miles or so north of Moscow, some way north of every significant city in North America except Anchorage).

In the meantime, I have little to say except that I'm still thinking about the long haul in extra-planetary travel. Running a biosphere (as the past couple of discussions suggest) looks to be a lot harder than most people imagine — we don't even know where all the critical paths lie, and the longer it has to operate the more complex it gets (with failure modes that mostly appear to be ghastly variations on dying painfully and slowly of exotic trace element and micronutrient deficiency diseases). But there's another question that occurs to me. What are the other problems with building and running a biosphere in space?

Here's one: waste heat dissipation.

Vacuum is, as has been noted in the past, a good insulator. At the same time, it looks likely that any long-term human space habitat is going to need shielding from high-energy cosmic radiation (which is probably going to be physical, rather than electromagnetic, given the multi-GeV energy spectrum of the radiation in question). And for long-duration habitability, biospheres are going to need to be complex, multiply-redundant, and to include pathways to recycling micronutrients and exotica (not just for cycling carbon dioxide and water back into oxygen and glucose).

Approximating a space-based biosphere to a sphere would seem sensible — you can maximize the inhabitable volume per unit of external surface area, and the mass of the radiation shielding goes up in proportion to the external surface, not the interior. But radiation shielding works in both directions: biospheres take short-frequency light and down-convert it into long-wavelength thermal energy (the second law of thermodynamics is in play, here). Don't underestimate the amount of heat we need to dump. Per kilogram, mammalian muscle tissue ("us") puts out more watts of waste heat than an equivalent mass of the sun generates through fusion reactions! The waste heat a biosphere produces ought to be proportional to the mass of metabolizing organisms; and that is going to scale with the volume of the biosphere.

So, while it might make sense to make our spherical biosphere as voluminous as possible (to make best use of the dead mass we're hauling around as shielding), it's going to need radiators to dump the waste heat into space (background temperature: 2.725 degrees Kelvin). Their area is going to go up in proportion to the volume of the biosphere, not its external surface area. And they're not going to be a useful contributory part of the biosphere — they have to be outside the cosmic radiation shielding.

What other gotchas associated with the mechanical supports for an in-space biosphere can we expect to run into? (NB: I'm deliberately ignoring propulsion, political/profit motivation, and crew. If you want to talk about the requirements of running a biosphere, that's the previous topic.)

Rae and Adam invited us and Fluffy for dinner on Saturday to say thankyou to Mike and Fluffy for being bridesmaids. So we got the train to Cardiff arriving late Saturday afternoon with just time to take the dog for a muddy 45 minutes walk before it got dark. Dinner was lovely, with good company and much playing of estimation whist and then hearts after dinner. On Sunday we got up and out of the house about 10:30 and took the dog for another much longer walk, about 2.5 hours with me on the lead for much of the time. I'm still surprised such a small dog is so strong, and so hard to wear out! We ended up with a nice walk along the cliffs though, and Mike and Monster made it down to the beach, although it was a bit too muddy for the rest of us to attempt. We finished off the weekend with a cheap and very plentiful lunch in the pub, and a lovely pint of Brains Dark, before Adam dropped us at the station.

Having gone all that way it seemed like a good idea to take a couple of days off work and go visit Mike's parents too. So we got a train to Newport, and the bus to Chepstow and a lift home from there to their house, for a lovely curry for dinner and much amusement for me with Gina's Wii Fit Plus: I've already put a copy on my amazon wishlist but Mike now tells me I may need to remove it again :) After dinner Evan dropped us at Phil's house for a pleasant evening of gossip and Rock Band.

On Monday we got up late and headed out after breakfast at nearly 12 for a nice little bike ride. 23.1 miles and 2100ft of climbing (and descending again!) in around three and a half hours rather completely wore me out, especially after all the walking the previous days. So we slumped on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon before trying to take Evan and Gina out for dinner. But despite us saying it could be a late birthday present to them they still insisted on paying for their half!

It was lovely to see them anyway, and we had a nice time, and have spent today travelling home again without having to worry about anything more disruptive to the rail network than a cow on the line at Roydon leading to a 15 minute delay. Tired now!

http://www.cyrius.com/journal/fossbazaar/lessons-from-freedos

http://www.cyrius.com/journal/2009/11/10/#lessons-from-freedos

A lot of people seem to think that open source is a magic solution to project management and that open source projects will automatically attract a large and healthy community of contributors and users who will improve the software. This, of course, is not the case. In fact, creating a successful open source project is a really major and difficult effort. You have to deliver an initial promise that people find interesting, attract other people, then facilitate and lead the community, etc. You just have to look at all the failed projects on SourceForge that never delivered any code to see that "open source" is not a guarantee for success.

Even though project management is a key element of every open source project, there are only few resources about this topic. That's why I always enjoy reading about the experience from open source project leaders. Jim Hall, the founder of the FreeDOS project, recently posted a series of four articles which I find particularly interesting.

Here are links to the articles along with a quick summary:

• Free and Open Source Software: the first article just describes what free software and open source are all about. It also looks at Raymond's model and compares the cathedral and the bazaar style of development.
• Open source software in the real world: this article summarizes a number of key lessons learned: every project needs a clear purpose (i.e. you have to solve an actual problem); initial users of the software should be recruited as developers; releases are important; and every project needs an active coordinator or maintainer.
• Cultivating Open Source Software: you need a web site; making the source code availability in an easy way is important; documentation is often hard to write but is vital; you need a bug tracking system and responding to bug reports is important to attract good feedback.
• Transitions in an open source software project: finally, when you need to hand over the project, make sure to communicate openly, arrange for your replacement and stick around to ensure a successful hand over.

I really like these articles from Jim Hall since they contain a lot of great insights that apply to other projects, so I suggest you check them out!

(Originally published on FOSSBazaar)

There has been a great response to my casual mention of the CL-USER map yesterday. Almost 50 new people have been added in the past 24 hours. I think it shows interesting patterns and I hope it can be used for Lispers to find each other for user group meetings, Lisp jobs, etc.

A few people have been confused about how to add themselves to the map. There are a few steps:

• Log in to your Google account
• Go to the map and click the "Edit" button:

  

• Find your location and click on the pin icon to drop a pin and enter your details:

  

I should also mention that I didn't create this map. Mirko Vukovic set it up initially and all the people who added their info to it have made it interesting. I just hope more people see it and get some value from it, so I've added it more prominently to Planet Lisp.

Enjoy!

Capitalism: A Love Story: * 3/4 (out of 4)

I like Michael Moore movies. I suppose that many would consider this a shameful admission; and if I tried, I'm sure I could justify it by talking about how it's a joy to look at pure propaganda. But truth be told, I like Michael Moore. TV Nation was a great show, back in the day; The Awful Truth was pretty funny too. His early movies were amusing, and his stunts were fairly clever and confrontational in a way that I generally respected. And as time went on, his skills as a propagandist have grown - which as done a fairly effective job of counteracting the problems that his increased notoriety has caused.

As such, I did have some expectations going into Capitalism: A Love Story. And I was disappointed.

Part of the problem with Capitalism was clearly that the topic was very broad. The format of Moore's movies is best-suited for a narrow topic, the smaller the better; but this movie is about an entire economic system, rather than the collapse of a factory town or a more narrow political area like gun control or health care. There's never a chance to examine the various sides of the issue in any kind of serious way; there is never a chance to fill in the caricatures, or even the basic theories. The movie simply lacked focus, and

Worse were the stunts - or, perhaps, a lack of them. Moore's cameras sat in on some home foreclosures, which failed to shine any sympathy on anybody involved while also bringing into question why nobody was willing to intervene. Moore attempted to perform some citizen's arrests at Goldman Sachs and other banks; this simply seemed half-hearted. And everything else hardly seemed connected. There were some smiles at the silliness here and there, but even that was hurt by the oddly out-of-place cursing. All in all, it just seemed... badly put together.

Somewhere in between was the quality of the arguments. Moore didn't really attack capitalism in this movie; he attacked the bailout, and he attacked corruption, but he didn't attack the whole system. If he'd left it at that, that'd be okay - it worked okay in Bowling for Columbine, for instance - but but in this case, he took what little he had and called for even more change than he ever had before. Frankly, he overplayed his hand, and even what value the movie had as propaganda was damaged as a result.

It's a shame; there were some interesting details in there, such as the discussion of Dead Peasant insurance policies and (most prominently) a look back at Flint, MI, where it all began. But while the beginning of this story was the best we're likely to get from Moore, this is likely the worst.

* 3/4

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/carter.asp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091109.html

Where do stars form when galaxies collide?

ACPI handles this case by providing a set of general purpose events (GPEs). The implementation of these is fairly straightforward - an ACPI table points at a defined system resource (typically an area of system io space, though in principle it could be something like mmio instead), and when the hardware fires an ACPI interrupt the kernel looks at this region to see which GPEs are flagged. Then things get more interesting.

The majority of GPEs are implemented in the ACPI tables via methods with names like _Lxx or _Exx. The xx is the number of the GPE in hex, while the leading _L or _E indicates whether the GPE is level- or edge-triggered. If an ACPI interrupt is fired and GPE 0x1D is flagged as being the source of the interrupt, the ACPI interpreter will then look for an _L1D or _E1D method. Upon finding one, it'll execute it. What this method does is entirely up to the firmware - on most HP laptops, GPE 0x1D is hooked up to the lid switch[1] and so executing it will send a notification to the OS that the lid switch has changed state. The OS will then evaluate the state of the lid switch (generally by making another ACPI query) and send the event up to userspace.

How does the lid end up triggering GPE 0x1D? Things get pretty hardware specific at this point. Intel motherboard chipsets have a set of general purpose io (GPIO) lines that can, for the most part[2], be used by the system vendor for anything they want. For a lid switch, one of these lines is hooked to the switch and the BIOS configures the GPIO as an input. Pressing the switch will cause the GPIO line to become active. The GPIO lines are mapped to GPEs in a 1:1 manner, though with an offset of 16 - ie, GPIO 0xd will map to GPE 0x1d. If GPIO 0xd becomes active, GPE 0x1d will be flagged and an ACPI interrupt sent. The ACPI code will then do something to quash the interrupts, such as inverting the polarity of the GPIO[3], as well as send the notification to the OS.

Why are the GPIOs offset by 16 relative to the GPEs? The lower 16 GPEs (again, talking about Intel hardware) have pre-defined purposes[4]. These range from things like "Critically low battery" to "PCIe hotplug event" down to "This device triggered a wakeup". And the latter is what I'm most interested in here.

Various pieces of modern hardware can be placed into power saving states when not in use. The problem with this is that the user experience of having to turn on hardware before you can use it is not a good one, so in order to make this the default behaviour we need the hardware to tell us that something happened that requires us to wake the hardware up.

There's something of a chicken and egg problem here, but thankfully most of the relevant modern hardware has out of band mechanisms to tell us about things going on. The PCI spec defines something called Power Management Events (PME), which are driven by an additional current that's supplied to the hardware even when it's otherwise turned off. On plug-in PCI Express cards, firing a PME generates an interrupt on the root bridge and a native driver can interpret that, but for legacy PCI devices and integrated chipset devices the notification has to come via ACPI.

The example I've been working on is USB. It's a good choice for various reasons - firstly, there's already support for detecting when the USB controller is idle. Secondly, modern USB host controllers have support for generating PMEs on device insertion, removal or (and this is important) remote wakeup. In other words, as long as the USB bus is idle we can power down the entire USB controller. If the OS tries to access a USB device, we'll power it back up. If the user unplugs or plugs a device, we'll power it back up. If a previously idle device suddenly responds to some external input, we'll power it back up. And it's all nicely invisible to the user.

How does this work? The controller retains a small amount of power even when nominally pwoered down. This is used to keep the detection circuitry alive. When it receives a wakeup event, it asserts the PME line. The chipset detects this and fires a GPE. The OS runs this GPE and receives a device notification on the ACPI representation of the USB controller, telling us to power it back up. We do so and process whatever woke us - if the bus then goes idle again, we can power down once more.

The astonishing thing is that this all works. The only problem we have is that it relies on the machine vendor to have provided the ACPI methods that are associated with the GPEs. If they haven't, we can't enable this functionality - even though the hardware is capable of generating the GPEs, we have no method to execute to let us know which device has to be woken up. The GPE is never answered, we never acknowledge the PME and the hardware keeps on screaming for attention without getting any. And, more to the point, it never gets powered up and your mouse doesn't work.

There's a pretty gross hack to deal with this. In general, we know what the GPE to device mappings are - they're pretty static across Intel chipsets, and while AMD ones can be programmed differently by the BIOS we can read that information back and set up a mapping ourselves. This trick also comes in handy when some vendors (like, say, Dell) manage to implement one of the GPE events wrongly. Everything looks like it should work, but the method never sends a notification because it's buggy. In that case we can unregister the existing method and implement our own instead.

This code isn't upstream yet, but patches have been posted to the linux-acpi mailing list and with luck it'll be there in the 2.6.33 timeframe. My tests suggest about 0.2W saving per machine, which isn't going to save all that many polar bears but seems worth it anyway.

[1] _L1D = lid. Sigh.

[2] There's a few that are reserved for specific purposes

[3] So where before it had to be high to be active, it now has to be low to be active - this means that it'll now trigger on the switch being opened rather than closed, so you'll get another event when you open the lid again.

[4] You can find a list in the documentation for the appropriate ICH chip - the relevant section is "GPE0_STS" under the LPC interface chapter.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7561&rss

Episode 5

Characters

In the past few days I've made a number of updates and changes to Planet Lisp. If you normally read the Planet via a feed, you will need to visit the site to see some of them.

• Added upcoming Lisp meetings in the sidebar; easily find Lisp meetings!
• Added embedded version of the CL-USER Google map in the sidebar; easily find Lisp users!
• Changed the appearance somewhat to get rid of big horizontal rectangles and lines
• Removed a number of feeds that had not updated in more than a year; that included some important past contributors like Juho Snellman (last updated in December of 2007) and Kevin Rosenberg.

As always, if you have a blog that's at least partly about Common Lisp, please send me a link so I can consider it for Planet Lisp.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7558&rss

I knew the Digital Cinema project that I’d been on for 6 years was doomed. But I didn’t know how doomed until the last week or so, when former colleagues on that project have suddenly started responding to the LinkedIn invitations to connect that I sent them a year ago. I’m guessing there is a lot of resume polishing and network building going on there right now. I’d say “Poor bastards”, but I’m in no better shape right now, except I did all that 6 months ago.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/oprahtip.asp