A Freudian mishearing:

Our 6th grader has been doing a unit on poetry, including having to write poems in the style of Walt Whitman. I find this degrading to Whitman: when they study da Vinci, are they supposed to do oil paintings in the style of da Vinci? No, apparently writing like Whitman is something that any 6th grader can do. Jeez.

Anyway, my son started to tell me about a poem a friend of his wrote as an assignment. My son said: So-and-so’s “Song of Myself Poem.” I heard: “Song of My Cell Phone.”

I telephone myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every ring tone belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

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At the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (about which I know nothing) you can read an open letter from some American citizens to the rest of the world. If you agree with enough of it, you can sign it.

Here is the first paragraph:

It is a troubled time. The drums of war, already loud, are daily being amplified by the megaphones of modern media. The U.S. government is adopting a doctrine of “pre-emptive war.” There are large numbers of people in the United States who do not agree. We want to extend our hands to people all over the world to work together for peace, justice, economic equity, and environmental sanity.

(Yeah, we could do without the mixed drums and megaphones metaphor.)

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Eric has some sharp (incisive and cutting) comments about my idea for trying to get vendors to agree to some restrictions on the sort of digital ID info they’ll ask for. Jonathan (whose “Empowered Customer Manifesto” should be read by all) pushes back. Eric pushes back back. Anyone care to push re-back back?

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Mike Booth has a brilliant answer to the fiendish Car Talk puzzle. He’s allowing me to blog it in the interest of “open source puzzling.” But I’d ask you not to enter it into the contest as your own, you slimy bastards. Here goes:

One of the prisoners is chosen to be the Scorekeeper and he gets these special instructions:

“The very first time you enter the switch room, turn switch B off. If switch B is already off, flip switch A (just to waste time). Once this first trip is over you are ready to start keeping score in your head. Your score starts at 1.

From now on, follow these instructions:
If switch B is on, turn it off and add 1 to your score.
If switch B is off, turn it on and subtract 1 from your score.
Eventually your score will reach 23. When it does, tell the warden that everyone has visited the switch room.”

Each of the other 22 prisoners gets these instructions:

“You are going to be sending a signal to the Scorekeeper to tell him that you’ve visited the switch room. But you can’t send the signal until you know that the Scorekeeper is listening.

When you first enter the switch room, flip switch A — but look at switch B and see if it is OFF or ON. Remember the position of switch B.

The next few times you enter the switch room, look to see if switch B has changed position. Once switch B changes position, you will know that the Scorekeeper is listening, and you can send the signal at your next opportunity. Until then, keep on flipping switch A every time. To send the signal, turn switch B from OFF to ON. If you can’t do that (because switch B is already ON) flip switch A and wait for another opportunity to send the signal. After you’ve sent the signal, don’t touch switch B again — just keep flipping switch A every time.

Remember, you are NEVER allowed to turn switch B off, and you are only allowed to turn it on ONCE.”

This strategy works because every player touches switch B exactly once, except for the Scorekeeper who is allowed to move it back and forth (but who keeps an account of how many moves he makes). In this system, Switch A isn’t very useful — it’s just something to do while waiting for a chance to use Switch B — and that makes me suspect that there’s a more elegant answer out there. I’ll wait and see.

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Here’s an idea obvious so obvious that it’s either been done or there’s a good reason why it hasn’t been done.

My worry about digital ID is that even with the most user-centered technology — the sort that Eric and Doc are pushing — inevitably users will be faced with a Hobson’s choice: Although the technology allows us to release only the ID information we choose, in order to do business with them vendors will insist that we give them more information than we want to. Technology that gives us control isn’t enough. We also need a marketplace that lets us exercise that control.

So, suppose vendors were encouraged to agree to a set of statements such as these:

If you agree to this, you get to put this button on your site that, of course, links to a web page that explains the details.

What do you think?

Note: This idea came up in the course of an interesting correspondence with Jonathan Peterson, although this doesn’t imply that Jonathan agrees with it.

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I went to the annual Brookline Library Gala on Sunday because they invite local authors in to flog their wares. For an hour the authors get to mingle with readers and with one another. Nice event. I’m awkward in such situations — you know, ones where there are other people — but I ran into Ned Batchelder who is much less so and who is damn interesting. (Ned’s excellent blog lists many of the authors in attendance and some of the diverse topics of discussion.)

Marvin Minsky strolled by, and I stood quietly as he and Ned talked. I learned two things:

1. Minsky was wearing a tie made out of climbing rope, a quirk that’s been reported before. What I didn’t know is that Minsky always carries rope with him because he has twice saved a life by being so prepared. He apparently encounters more quicksand and crevasses than most of us do.

2. Ned and I had been talking about Wolfram, a semi-local author, so Ned asked Minsky if he had read Wolfram’s book. “Of course not.” Why not? Because Wolfram is merely repeating what has been known for twenty years. Further, said Minsky, the book only finds three types of cellular automata: simple ones, looping ones, and complex ones. For a theory to be interesting, said Minsky, it needs to have at least five categories, not three. Minsky was being cocktail-party witty, but I believe his serious point was that Wolfram needs to present a theory that further analyzes the single class of complex and seemingly random cellular automata.

[Note: Yes I am bothered about blogging a private conversation with someone. But I’m using my judgment. Minsky didn’t hesitate to tell two strangers (Ned and me) what I’ve reported. Neither of these points seems too personal. And let me make clear that I may well have gotten the point about Wolfram wrong since Minsky is a couple primates up the evolutionary tree from me.]

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AKMA has a way to ease into a digital ID infrastructure. (Hint: If we are what we eat, at long last we’ll know exactly who we are.)

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Just to prove my point about my dysfactia, I recently said that Mac OS X uses bayesian probability to filter spam. I said that because I read it somewhere on the Internet. (Damn Intermenet!) Kevin Marks not only wrote to correct me — the Mac uses Latent Semantics — but also cc’ed Tim Oren who then blogged a brilliant explanation and analysis of the two techniques. Thus has my stupidity made us all a little smarter.

Don’t thank me. It’s what I do.

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An article in the Boston Globe today on the death of the floppy points to the “information explosion” as a contributory cause. Citing a UC Berkeley study, the article says:

The Web now has more than a half-billion pages, 95 percent of them accessible to the public…and the volume grows by more than 7 million pages daily.

Google has indexed over 3 billion. I thought the common wisdom was that there are over 20 billion pages, although I haven’t been able to track that figure down. But a half-billion is clearly wrong.

Given my own dysfactia, I don’t report this to make fun of the author for making a mistake. Talk about your kettle talking to a frying pan! But usually you can see how a mistake happens. Maybe the author dropped a zero. Maybe the number actually represents a year’s growth, not the total number of pages. Any suggestions? Just curious.

And, more important, any links to recent studies of the size of the Web?

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The weekly Puzzler from Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys, was so hard that they extended it a week and gave some hints. I woke up this morning at 5:30 and knew the answer without having thought about it consciously. Next on my dream agenda: Re-discover benzine’s structure!

Unfortunately, when I re-checked the puzzle this morning, I found I’d significantly altered its terms, a case of having the right answer to the wrong question.

Anyway, here’s the puzzle:

The warden meets with 23 new prisoners when they arrive. He tells them, “You may meet today and plan a strategy. But after today, you will be in isolated cells and will have no communication with one another.

“In the prison is a switch room, which contains two light switches labeled A and B, each of which can be in either the ‘on’ or the ‘off’ position. I am not telling you their present positions. The switches are not connected to anything.

“After today, from time to time whenever I feel so inclined, I will select one prisoner at random and escort him to the switch room. This prisoner will select one of the two switches and reverse its position. He must move one, but only one of the switches. He can’t move both but he can’t move none either. Then he’ll be led back to his cell.

“No one else will enter the switch room until I lead the next prisoner there, and he’ll be instructed to do the same thing. I’m going to choose prisoners at random. I may choose the same guy three times in a row, or I may jump around and come back.

“But, given enough time, everyone will eventually visit the switch room as many times as everyone else. At any time anyone of you may declare to me, ‘We have all visited the switch room.’

“If it is true, then you will all be set free. If it is false, and somebody has not yet visited the switch room, you will be fed to the alligators.”

And then we get three hints:

Hint number 1: A sixth grader could figure this puzzler out.

Hint B: Take a long-term perspective.

And Hint III: Solve the puzzler for three prisoners.

You can submit your answer to Car Talk…but you gotta tell me first.

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