Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax

Bruce Schneier announced that the story about Mao's "Little Red Book" and FBI agents was a hoax. SouthCoastToday, the original publisher, published the correction. Thanks to Andrew for the link.

I, and apparently a number of librarians out there, are still quite curious whether the inter-library loan system is being monitored. I intend to push the limits by ordering every book I can find on the suspected watch list to see what happens.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 3

Why is it that requesting (not even reading) a book on the watch list will get you a visit from the FBI, but the Improvised Munitions Handbook (US Army Training Manual 31-210) is widely available for download? You can get a nicely printed copy of it from the same people that print it for the Pentagon for US$12.

Does anyone else find this a bit surreal?

NB: Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax.

See also: Part 2.

Victory in Pennsylvania over "Intelligent Design"

A U.S. district judge ruled today that a Pennsylvania school system cannot teach "Intelligent Design" in a biology class, calling it a violation of the Constitutional separation of church and state.

Although I try to be tolerant of other people's ideas, I am particularly pleased that this watered-down religious dogma is not going to be taught as science, at least there and at least for now. I have previously posted on a refutation of "irreducible complexity", a foundation of the "Intelligent Design" argument.

Thanks to Brian for pointing me to Garry Trudeau's take on the decision.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 2

I've ordered the full copy of Mao's "The Little Red Book" from the inter-library loan system. I have also posted an Ask Slashdot question on which other books might be on the watch list. Hopefully, the Slashdot editors will approve it.

I've decided to request as many books on the watch list as I can find.

See also: Part 1, Part 3.

Taking a Stand on Banned Books, Part 1

A friend pointed me to a The Standard-Times report today about a student at U.Mass Dartmouth who requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "The Little Red Book" for a research paper. The student was visited by agents of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and never got access to the book. (NB: Story About "Little Red Book" was a Hoax)

The shocking thing about this is not that the Patriot Act is being abused. We all knew that would happen. The shocking thing is that the student wishes to remain nameless because he "fears repercussions", according to the report. Similarly, the student's professor is considering canceling plans for a class on terrorism because "because it might put his students at risk".

Should we stand idly by while strong-arm tactics are applied to our civil liberties, or should we defend our right to read the dangerous, inciteful, often mistaken but certainly educational books of our enemies? Sun Tsu and Clauswitz agreed on the first principle of war, "know your enemy". Sun Tzu, for example, said "The more you read and learn, the less your adversary will know." How can we know them if we can't read what they have written?

Commenting on the possible relationship between "The Little Red Book" and the War on Terror is nearly beneath me. Why is this book on a watch list at all? Under which general principles is this book a danger to our society? Its contents are even well known and widely quoted.

I have decided to take a stand. Immediately after this posting, I am headed to my local library (conveniently located in Ashburn, VA, close to the Washington, DC headquarters of the FBI) to request a copy of "The Little Red Book". I will be careful to request the version directly translated from the Chinese via inter-library loan and published in Beijing. Naturally, I will post the results here.

See also Part 2.

Thomas Jefferson and Tokugawa Ieyasu

Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence from Britain, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603-1868, were very different people. Jefferson espoused Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and Tokugawa was a ruthless military dictator. Their works set their respective countries on very different paths that would last centuries. Yet surprisingly, the personal codes for living used by the two men were remarkably similar.

Jefferson's Ten Rules are available from Monticello or, for a more academic link, see Cornell University Library.

Tokugawa's Creed is here in Japanese, but the creed itself is translated into English.

True to Jefferson's protestant Christian cultural package, most of his rules are negative directions, whereas Tokugawa's Asian philosophies come out in his positive directions for the "proper" way of living.

Both men went to great lengths to calm their minds to avoid acting from anger. Jefferson: "Take things always by the smooth handle.", "When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, count a hundred." Tokugawa: "Patience is the foundation of security and long life; consider anger as an enemy."

Both recognized what is today sometimes called " material trap", although I suspect Jefferson came to it pretty late in life. Jefferson: "Never spend money before you have earned it.", "Never buy what you don't want because it is cheap.", "We seldom repent of having eaten too little." Tokugawa: "If you regard discomfort as a normal condition, you are not likely to be troubled by want.", "The insufficient is better than the superfluous." (which is more literally translated as, "Realize your limitations. It is the biggest dew drop that first falls from the leaf.")

Both preferred to be their own men. Jefferson: "Never trouble another for what you can do yourself." Tokugawa: "Blame yourself, do not blame others."

Neither believed their own press and fought against the temptation to do so. Jefferson: "Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold." Tokugawa: "When ambition rises in your mind, consider the days of your adversity." Note that Tokugawa was held as a captive for much of his childhood and here he councils patience, as he does elsewhere.

Naturally, there are some differences. Jefferson's "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today." seems to conflict with Tokugawa's "Man's life is like making a long journey with a heavy burden. One must not hurry." Still, I suspect that those rules refer to different concepts. I doubt Tokugawa was lazy, he just knew how and when to wait. Jefferson may have had a similar concept in mind when he penned "How much pain the evils cost us that never happened.", his consideration that one should avoid excessive worry.

There does not seem to be a direct comparison to Jefferson's "Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly." Tokugawa may have recognized the fact, but probably didn't think it important given his austere manner of daily living.

One has no way of knowing Jefferson's feelings regarding Tokugawa's "He who only knows victory and does not know defeat will fare badly.", but, given Jefferson's support of the American Revolution, he was clearly willing to put his privileged position at risk.

In all, I find the number of similarities to greatly outweigh the differences. That these two men should share so much in common makes me re-evaluate the boundary between Adolph Bastian's "elementary ideas", which we all share, and "folk ideas" (culture).

Memes and Simple Survival

I recently ran across Stanford's provacative John McCarthy and his ideas on Ideology and Sustainability. I really must remember to introduce him to evolutionary meme theories and see what happens.

A Simple and Effective Wiki in Ruby

I was looking for a simple but effective wiki to run on Mac OS X for my home network. After a bit of looking, I found SOKS. It was trivial to set up and use.

SOKS is written in Ruby and released under an Open Source license.

To install SOKS, one simply grab it via gems, the ruby package manager, run the setup script and start using it:


$ sudo gem install Soks
$ /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/Soks-1.0.3/bin/soks-create-wiki.rb


The soks-create-wiki.rb script will ask you where you want to install the wiki itself. Anywhere will do. The directory you use will be referred to as '...' for the rest of this post.

Use a Web browser to go to http://localhost:8000, which shows you instructions for use and customization. At a minimum, you will want to modify the stylesheet located at .../attachment/stylesheet.css (since the default reds are ugly) and .../attachment/logo.jpg (the site logo). To name the wiki and expose it via a public URL, you will need to modify a couple of lines at the top of .../start.rb, but this is well documented.

I only had one problem with the setup: Some (not all) of the URLs in the sidebar continued to point to localhost, even after I changed the system base URL to a proper machine name. The solution was to edit the sidebar to remove just one of the links and then again to put it back in. Whatever cache was stale happily updated.

Mac OS X uses launchd to launch applications on boot and when directed by the launchctl command line utility. To get the wiki launching automatically, I created a file called /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/soks.plist with the following content:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>soks</string>
<key>OnDemand</key>
<false/>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/local/bin/ruby</string>
<string>/Users/dwood/Documents/soks-wiki/start.rb</string>
</array>
<key>ServiceIPC</key>
<false/>
</dict>
</plist>


Once that file is in place, the wiki may be started:


$ sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/soks.plist
$ sudo launchctl start soks


I used the Mac's Network System Preferences to open port 8000 in the firewall so other machines on my network could access the service.

NB: Unfortunately, I wouldn't use SOKS on a public machine yet. Ruby 1.8.3 seems to have a broken YAML which prohibits SOKS from running and Ruby 1.8.2 (which I'm using) has a known security flaw. I'm sure the Ruby guys will square that away shortly.

Bernadette and I are using SOKS to work collaboratively on a new book. More details on that coming shortly.

Terry Pratchett on Venture Capital

I just finished Terry Pratchett's Going Postal (hey, it is the holidays!). It is another in the incredibly punny, and subtley in-your-face Discworld series. In it is this beautiful passage on venture capital, as spoken by Ankh-Morpork's despot Lord Vetinari (page 74 of the American paperback):

"Let us consider a situation in which some keen and highly inventive men devise a remarkable system of communication", he said. "What they have is a kind of passionate ingenuity, in large amounts. What they don't have is money. They are not used to money. So they meet some... people, who introduce them to other people, friendly people, who for, oh, a forty-percent stake in the enterprise give them the much-needed cash and, very important, much fatherly advice and an introduction to a really good firm of accountants. And so they proceed, and soon money is coming in and money is going out, but somehow, they learn, they're not quite as financially stable as they think, and really do need more money. Well, this is all fine, because it's clear to all that the basic enterprise is goinig to be a money tree one day, and does it matter if they sign over another fifteen percent? It's just money. It's not important in the way that shutter mechanisms are, is it? And then they find out that yes, it is. It is everything. Suddenly, the world's turned upside down, suddenly those nice people aren't so friendly anymore, suddenly it turns out that those bits of paper they signed in a hurry - were advised to sign by people who smiled all the time - mean that they don't actually own anything at all, not patents, not property, nothing. Not even the contents of their own heads, indeed. Even any ideas they have now don't belong to them, apparently. And somehow they're still in trouble about money. Well, some run and some hide and some try to fight, which is foolish in the extreme, because it turns out that everything is legal, it really is. Some accept low-level jobs in the enterprise, because one has to live and in any case the enterprise evens owns their dreams at night. And yet actual illegality, it would appear, has not taken place. Business is business."

The passage is quoted under the right granted by HarperCollins Publishers for brief quotations in reviews. Italics in the original.

Highly recommended! Buy a copy today.

Great Mexican Restaurant in Herndon, VA

If you ever want to find a superb Mexican restaurant (and who doesn't?) and are near Herndon, Virginia, check out Teocalli Tamale at 336 Elden St, Herndon, VA, 20170, +1 703 904 9336. They are fantastic!

Mike, the owner, started Teocali Tamale in Colorado and brought the slow-roasted tradition to Virginia. The restaurant itself is a small hole-in-the-wall in a strip mall, but classic Blues play inside and the food is just wonderful. Give 'em a try! I plan to hold all my lunch meetings there for the forseeable future.

Explaining the Debate on Iraq

The debate on the war in Iraq is simple to explain. Why do our professional warriors insist that the war can be won? Because it is their job to believe they can win. They want to win. They demand to win. They would insist on victory even if (especially if) they were fighting an unbeatable enemy on the streets of Washington, D.C. Any war strategy based on asking the military whether they think they can win is doomed to failure.

That is yet another reason why an enlightened country should actively avoid war, and yet fight any it is forced into to the death. Unfortunately, we were not forced into this war; we sought it and are now paying the price, much as we paid the price for the ridiculously aggressive Spanish-American War or the ill-conceived Vietnam War.

How many times must we be told that causing and then fighting a serious insurgency is a bad idea? History tells us that, as do the current insurgencies around the world. Not one of them is being truly won. At best, they fall into an uncomfortable pseudo peace, for a while.

Better to lead in a way that others will follow, as Congressman Ron Paul said in 2002 - and complained that he was being attacked as a terrorist sympathizer for following the foreign policy ideals of America's founding fathers. We lead the world when we are better than our enemies, not when we engage in torture, plant propaganda in the foreign press and otherwise act as ignorant and ill-behaved as they are.

To make matters right, we must lead morally. Only then will the world follow.

I believe that America is acting in inappropriate ways for the simple reason that we all want to, sometimes. It is a normal emotional response in our leaders to lash out at what we do not understand and to do so with force. The only thing that prevents that overreaction is the calming action of the balance of governmental powers. The only way to save America from itself is to restore the limitations once imposed on the executive branch by policy. A new check on the Administration's ability to wield military power, unreliant on policy, is needed.

XTech 2006 Call for Participation

The Call for Participation for XTech 2006 (formerly XML Europe) is now available. The conference will be 16-19 May 2006 in Amsterdam (note that WWW 2006 is 23-26 May in Scotland). The track that includes SemWeb, tagging, microformats is entitled "Open Data".

Papers at this conference are selected by peer review of *abstracts*.

The important dates are:
9 January / Presentation and Tutorial Proposals Due
10 February / Accepted Speakers Notified
17 March / Late Breaking News & Product Proposals Due

I presented the Kowari overview paper at XTech 2005, which was also in Amsterdam. It was a lot like WWW, only less so. A number of the speakers overlapped, as did the content and focus. If you can't get to WWW, XTech is a reasonable choice.

Trip Report from WISE 2005's International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005)

On Sunday, 20 November 2005, I attended the International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2005), held as part of The 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2005) in New York City. Whew! That is a rather fancy way of saying that I spent a weekend day working in a small conference room with twenty SemWeb geeks, about half of whom I already knew.

Semantic Web repositories were well represented: Dave Beckett, creator of Redland, Steve Harris of 3Store and Alex Hall and myself from Kowari.

I was on the program committee for the workshop and presented a short paper entitled "Scaling the Kowari Metastore" [1]. That paper surveyed the options to keep Kowari as the most scalable SemWeb database. I hope we will get the chance to implement some of them in 2006 so we can keep ahead of the game.

Dave Beckett moved from the University of Manchester to Yahoo! in October 2005. It is interesting to see Yahoo! hiring SemWeb people and reportedly using them on SemWeb projects.

The most interesting talk (to me) was on a new repository for OWL data called OWLIM [2]. The talk was given by primary author Atanas Kiryakov. OWLIM supports RDFS and OWL DLP and (yet another) variant he called "OWL Horst", based on a ISWC 2005 paper written by H.J. ter Horst [3].

Owl Horst is an RDFS-compatible OWL fragment which allows extensions with rules. It contains less Description Logic than OWL Lite, but more capability for rules extensibility. OWL Horst provides entailment over RDF graphs based on rules of triple patterns, with variables at any position (subject, object and/or predicate).

Atanas said that general rules extensibility in OWLIM is "possible"; which probably means that they have not exposed a generic rules engine yet. Interestingly, InverseFunctionalProperty is included as a primitive property. No cardinality constraints are included, though, which I contend limits its usefulness with ontologies dealing with business data.

OWLIM is available as a Storage and Retrieval Layer (SAIL) for Sesame. Unfortunately, although it is Open Source (LGPL), it runs on Ontotext's TRREE engine, which is freely available but proprieary to Ontotext. OWLIM reportedly has very fast upload, and retreival/query speeds, but relatively slow deletes. Its scalability becomes limited with high implicit/explicit statement ratios. They claim 30 million statements as an upper limit on reasonable hardware (64-bit Opteron), 10 million on 32-bit desktops. It is written in Java 1.5. Query speeds are claimed to be linear with data size; delete time is also linear (20 sec per million statements present).

Atanas strongly encourged the Kowari team to head toward an implementation of OWL Horst instead of the OWL Lite plus full cardinality support that we planned. I will have to look into whether we could add full cardinality to OWL Horst. If we can, it sounds like a reasonable thing to do.

Steve Harris presented his recent work on implementing SPARQL in his 3Store RDF repository [4]. 3Store is written in C and uses mySQL as a storage backend. Steve has managed to auto-generate reasonable SQL from SPARQL to allow 3Store to handle some tens of millions (up to 35 million) of RDF statements. He did not implement SPARQL's nested optional, nested union or case-insensitive regexps, but that still makes it nearly complete with the SPARQL specification.

I am sure that Steve's work will come in really handy for Oracle, if they look at it. No one from Oracle was in attendance.

Denis Ranger from Mind Alliance presented his work with Jean-Francois Cloutier on a query algorithm for scalable SemWeb P2P systems [5]. Their algorithm relies on Pastry and Scribe, both created by Microsoft Research (A non-interoperable FreePastry implementation has been released under a BSD-like license from Rice University.) Data routing is handled by Pastry; peers are connected to a small set of neighbors and the connections are rebalanced automatically as peers come and go. Scribe provides publish and subscribe message- and topic-handling. They are working on a simulation and I look forward to seeing it work.

It is interesting that several researchers have been using the Lehigh University Benchmark (LUBM) data to benchmark OWL-oriented systems. It seems to be becoming a de facto standard.

References:

[1] Wood, D., Scaling the Kowari Metastore, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 193-198, 2005.

[2] Kiryakov, A., Ognyanov, D., and Manov, D., OWLIM- A Pragmatic Semantic Repository for OWL, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 182-192, 2005.

[3] ter Horst, H.J., Combining RDF and part of OWL with Rules: Semantics, Decidability, Complexity. In Proc of ISWC 2005.

[4] Harris, S., SPARQL Query Processing with Conventional Relational Database Systems, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 235-244, 2005.

[5] Ranger, D. and Cloutier, J.F., Scalable Peer-to-Peer RDF Query Algorithm, in Dean, M., et al. (Eds.): WISE 2005 Workshops, LNCS 3807, pp. 266-274, 2005.

$100 Green Machine Debuts at UN

Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan demoed the Green Machine last week at the United Nations (stories at BBC, New Scientist, IEEE Spectrum). This is the coolest thing I have seen in a long, long time! It is meant to bring a reasonable level of computing to the poor children of the world.

The Green Machine is a sub-$100 laptop computer powered by a hand-cranked dynamo. It contains a simple, dual-mode bright LED screen to save power (no backlighting) and includes mesh networking capabilities to share Internet connections or just create ad-hoc networks. Naturally, it uses exclusively Open Source software, both to keep the price down and to facilitate internationalization to the world's poorest countries who are not a market force.

Professor Negroponte thinks he can get millions of these things built in short order and plans to sell them to governments, presumably opening the way for grants to help. Go, man, go!

Decent VIM RegExp Guide

I finally found a decent, readable guide to regular expressions in vim: http://www.geocities.com/volontir/. Yay!

Guitar Lessons

Well, I've done it again. Just as my life was starting to get a bit less frenetic I've taken on another project. My friend Naser took my to the Guitar Center in Fairfax and I bought a Yamaha six-string acoustic guitar. I haven't done a bit of work in the last several days, spending my time instead trying to wrap my short fingers around the eight basic chords described in Guitar Noise's Asolute Beginner series of articles. Naser is going to give me my first formal lesson on Friday.

I always thought computers were a terrible time sink. You start coding and hours just slip by. Guitars, at first glance, would seem to be worse.

Tufte Course Review

I attended a one-day course on data graphics yesterday, given by the justly-famous Edward Tufte. I highly recommend both the course and his books, but, as usual, have some comments.

The best parts of the course were his introduction to sparklines and his comments on the deleterious effects of Microsoft Powerpoint.

Tufte recommends a radical increase in the information density of documents and presentations. That gives documents and presentations more readability and assists the retention of information.

However, such a significant increase in information density means that in order to create a Tufte-approved presentation, one must take the time and effort to include all that additional information. One will not always have the time to do that. Office workers, military officers, stock traders and others in operational roles are often required to brief quickly, before ideas are fully formed. This, of course, never happens in science. Tufte notes that his first book required twelve years to write.

Blaise Pascal once apologized for writing a long letter, saying "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." In other words, he was saying that he did not choose to spend the time to radically increase the information density. That is an economic decision and, as we all know, all engineering is economics. Thanks to Brian S. for properly attributing the quote.

I noticed one other interesting phenomenon. At the end of the day, Prof. Tufte ended the lecture, the audience applauded and he waved. Then he basked in the applause, like a rock star or a politician. The last person I saw enjoy applause that much was Bill Clinton. Tufte has commented that his reviewers never include graphics, so here is my rendition of him basking in applause: . The image is, of course, a play on his "airport signal people".

Still, the course was interesting and thought provoking. I highly recommend it as an addendum to reading his books.

The Legacy of Rosa Parks

Bernadette went to the Capitol last night to see Rosa Parks lying in state. The Capitol Police reported that 30,000 people made it through (Bernadette left when she realized it was a six hour wait after midnight).

I have admired Mrs. Parks for one simple reason: At a time when full-grown men were scared to stand up to injustice, she did. Now I admire her more for something else. Bernadette says that only about one third of the people in line were black. Mrs. Parks managed to transcend race in America while bringing people together and that is a difficult thing.

Kowari v1.1 in Code Freeze

I am pleased to announce that Kowari v1.1 is now in code freeze. I will set up the CVS repository for v1.2 shortly.

The MP3 and Filesystem Resolvers were removed for this release due to the need to forward-port that tutorial to use the new permanent model names. It was worth it; having permanent model names which are not associated with a URL fixes several bugs and will reduce headaches for people using Kowari on laptops or any host which changes names regularly.

All test are finally passing and we are well on our way to our first real release as a project after Tucana's demise.

Refuting "Irreducible Complexity"

Bernadette and I attended a fascinating seminar at AAAS on Thursday entitled, "Evolution of Biological Complexity". It was part of AAAS's Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) lecture series. The speaker was Chistoph Adami, a professor of Applied Life Sciences at Keck Graduate Institute and a researcher at Cal Tech.

Prof. Adami discussed his most recent research on the Avida software, which simulates Darwinian evolution in silico. The Avida group has managed to show how complex adaptive traits can evolve using only the Darwinian algorithm via the accumulation of mutations. This is a stunning (although, in evolutionary camps, not unexpected) breakthrough in theorectical evolution.

A quick summary of the problem and its recent solution goes like this: Intelligent Designists say that certain biological features are far too complex to have been evolved using Darwin's algorithm. They (especially Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe) have claimed that since very complex structures (say, for example, the eye) rely on the simultaneous activation of many (tens, hundreds, thousands) of genes, they could not possibly evolve by successive single mutations. This is known as "irreducible complexity", because the complex nature of the structure is not thought to be reducible into a series of single mutations. Adami and Avida have shown otherwise.

Avida has been used to evolve a set of computer programs which compete for CPU time in a race to find solutions to mathematical problems. Adami presented an example of the equality operator, evolved from a series of NAND operations, which required the simultaneous activation of some 20 "genes". He then went on to dissect the history of the evolved operator, showing that it was not active until the last (single gene) mutation, but all the intermediate states were, in fact, functional. Several simpler operators (e.g. AND) were evolved and then lost on the way towards EQU. Surprisingly, the evolutionary train of mutations included several mutations which were downright harmful to the program, severely reducing its fitness. These deleterious mutations survived just long enough to pass on their genes to an offspring which was then mutated in a positive manner. Thus, an examplar structure which met all criteria for "irreducible complexity" was shown to be, in fact, both evolable and emminently reducible.

Importantly, this breakthrough specifically refutes the argument most commonly used by proponents of "Intelligent Design"; that Darwinian evolution cannot account for complex biological features. I hope that this new knowledge can be brought to bear on the recent debates regarding the teaching of evolution in US schools.