Climate Change

Air conditioning simply isn’t used as much here in London; the indoors are kept a few degrees (F) warmer than I am used to in Chicago, which has a similar (outdoors) climate.

I’d expect that if I stayed here I’d sweat off about 10 lbs just doing standard office work, which could explain how the average frailty here is noticeably higher.

A Can of Coke

SI measurements mean a can of pop is 330ml, which is just shy of 11.2 oz. In the US, it’s a 12oz can. That’s about 12 calories less sugar per-can, which would be another reason why people here are thinner.

Metropolitan

Holy Christ as a cracker.

So here’s the thing: U.S. cities are mostly planned and Cartesian; they’re on a grid. It may not be perfect, but you can expect big long streets that run the length of the city, cross-streets that cut over, and a few exceptions that cut diagonally to help you get from A — C without going north to B, then over to C. Once and a while, a street will dead-end for some reason, and you’ll have to go around the block, or up and over a few to find an underpass beneath the expressway or avoid a one-way section of a street.

And for you native Bostonians, I recommend you come visit your cousins in Chicago and you’ll see what I mean… Hell, even Newark has a grid.

You can also expect the numbers to count up coherently: if I say that Madison and State are (0,0), and I live on 1800 N. Wells, you can figure out pretty easily how to get from Madison and State to my house by glancing at a map. The only information that isn’t encoded in the address is the X axis of Wells, which means that once I know 2D geometry (which everyone is taught the first year of High School), the only additional cognitive load required to find my way to any given address is the missing coordinate of the street the address is on. I have to learn that Wells = 200 West, that x = –200. And that’s something you can learn once and never forget. If I do have to detour for some reason, I know that I’ve cut over to Clark, which is 100 West, and can get back most any time I want.

Not so in London, at least Tower Hill, which is where my hotel is. Without some kind of map, it isn’t even possible to discern that you’re headed the wrong direction—even Sol has deserted you in your quest. The closest analogue I can imagine is that some mad fiend has turned the heart of a major metropolitan area into the cul-de-sac hell that is restricted to the suburbs in the US.

I’m not saying that Hell is wrong, but I can turn left twice and still end up travelling the same direction, because the streets all curve and stop after a block or two. Just sayin’

This also means that cabbies here have a tremendous racket, as they can legitimately meander around a neighborhood trying to find a street which only exists for a block or two. It also means that no matter where you are, where you’re going, or how you’re getting there, it will take you about an hour.

Transit Costs

The Underground is 2.3x more expensive than the CTA. Yes, things are much more posh, and London is more expensive in general, but it costs me 6 USD, rather than 2.5 USD to get anywhere.

Cheers

“Thanks, you’re a diamond, babe” is not something you’d ever hear in the U.S. for letting someone bum a smoke. (Well, maybe Boystown.) I tend to worry that I come across as something of an ogre for the businesslike, give-nothing-away, “thanks” I’m used to. We’re not assholes, we just play poker.

Update: If you’re tempted to take offense, please recall these are tongue-in-cheek, touristy observations of a confessed business-traveling Chicagoan who actually did enjoy himself, particularly on Brick Road the night before he left.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about privacy lately. Most of the shiny things here on the internet are some type of service where you abandon some degree of privacy to an intermediary in return for convenience or community: your blog, Facebook, Twitter, GMail, Amazon.com, and Last.fm take much of the random bits of your life and put them into corporate-owned databases so you can connect with friends, buy random things without moving, or not have to edit the same silly preferences dialogs 50 times. OKCupid, Google Latitude and Mint do so with your peccadilloes, your physical location, and your financial records.

There’s a certain amount of trust involved in participating in all this: the trust that your information is ultimately anonymous or only sold to advertisers. Of course, Google logs what you’re looking for, and everything that’s made public, and it’s worth pointing out that there’s really nothing preventing an organization from collating all this information together, which is an end to most of what we call privacy and the sense of freedom that comes along with it. About the only exception is medical records, which are protected in the US by privacy laws. My understanding is that it’s a crime to give unauthorized people access to those records, but I’m a little shaky on what happens after that privacy has been breached—that is, once the bribed clerk has given out the records, are there laws to prevent the recipient from distributing them further?

Minutiae aside, there’s a larger, unasked question of the social cost for all this. Does the lack of privacy manifest as a monumental chilling effect? Does it turn out after all your activities are cataloged and recorded that you’re less free? Do you self-censor and live in fear of being discovered, or (I’d say) foolishly assume that your privacy is a traditional social norm that will continue to be respected? Grab a green flag and march against the fact the only real privacy you have is “the two inches inside your own head?”

Whatever the social cost of this new world will turn out to be, we’re living in it already, and people are going to have to figure out how to make it compatible with the concept of a free society. Which is why I redesigned my blog to integrate the Lifestream wordpress plugin and display all of my publically-accessible activities in one place: the music I’m listening to, the movies I’m watching, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. I’d actually like it if I could put my Amazon.com purchases on there like Facebook tried to do without asking anyone. There’s nothing in any of these databases that a government agency, corporation, or partner couldn’t get their hands on if they wanted really to.

I promised I’d tie this back into GNOME at some point: possibly the most interesting thing about a project like Zeitgeist is that it puts that record of what you’re doing in a place where you can access it—it doesn’t solve the underlying conflict, of course, but it does let you use it for your own purposes.

1. There is now a corollary to “do not write your own cryptographic routines”: “do not fix bugs in someone else’s cryptographic routines.” If there is a annotated view of the OpenSSL tree (I don’t know/don’t care), the DD who patched OpenSSL would have been better off contacting the person who wrote the offending line in the original source than trying to find the correct channel.
2. Developers must publish correct information on how to contact them. Incorrect information on the OpenSSL website maintenance is just as much to blame for this as the DD in question, who did ask the suggested channels about his patch.
3. Distros should have peer review of patches in security-critical code—by experienced developers—if they do not already.
4. Rather than all the bitching, remember that the central tenet of F/LOSS is Fix It Yourself. This does not cease to apply simply because the problem exists in something you depend on. If anything, it should emphasize how necessary it is.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
184 svn
165 ls
101 cd
96 ldapsearch
95 ssh
62 vim
25 ping
24 grep
23 sudo
20 rm

Also, Scott Ian is the motherfuckin’ man, though I think Baltar is very clearly supposed to be a Factured Fairlytales version of Jesus (the beard was the givaway, I thought).

Update: Turns out Sci-Fi is owned by NBC Universal, who in turn is owned by GE (80%) and Vivendi (20%).

• I was bitten by April Fools twice today. The second time because I was too exhausted to remember that it was April Fools.
• A life without hope is not wasted or a pity any more than a life without religion is.
• A good friend of mine once told me that if you listen to what people say carefully, they will give themselves away at some point. Like most wisdom phrased in an open-ended way, I’ve seen lots of confirmation of this and little contradiction.
• I think a fair number of people like to dominate others with their words. Being on the receiving end of that kind of thing is really exhausting. I think it’s fairly obviously just people playing out their psychodramas in an environment where you can’t just club and be clubbed.
• State-granted monopolies on culture, art, and media in general stifle creativity, limit freedom, and exist to protect one power against another. In this society it’s almost always used to protect the established power against the new one. Standard Lessig, now apply it to those organizations we may otherwise support. That pinched-face discomfort you are feeling is cognitive dissonance between your stated preferences and your desire to defend your principles.