Against Sleep

I don't dislike sleep itself.

Right now I should be going to sleep, but I'm not because for some reason, some nights, the apex of my alertness for the entire day hits as soon as my head hits the pillow. Tonight already feels like one of those nights where I lie awake for hours waiting for my brain to shut itself off so I can stop staring at my clock and watching the hours tick by. And every ten minutes I remember something else I could be doing instead of waiting for sleep (like writing this blog post) and I either do it, or it bounces around inside my skull for the next half hour until I remember something more important that I've forgotten to do.

What's worse than the nights, though, is the mornings. I always feel incredibly groggy in the mornings, sometimes (rarely, luckily) to the point that I can't even get myself out of bed - and that's when I've had enough sleep. When I don't get enough sleep, it feels like microscopic ninjas have snuck under my skin while I was sleeping and sprinkled a layer of fine grit right under my epidermis. If I could switch the way I feel in the morning with the way I feel in the middle of the night, I might not be a happier person, but I'd probably at least be a lot more balanced.

And in between these two wonderfully inverted polar opposites, I dream. I'm really glad I don't remember the vast majority of my dreams, because based on the ones I do remember, I apparently dream in low-budget sci-fi horror flicks. Let's look at some recent dreams that I remember. In the most recent one, I had the power to travel back in time and redo parts of my life, but I was hunted and repeatedly killed by somebody with a similar power. In another recent dream, I die in some sort of zombie outbreak caused by a mind-controlling fungus. I wake up decades later after it revives me for some reason; it's taken over the world and nobody realizes it (because the fungus altered everybody's memories, natch). It's never bright and happy dreams, it's always stuff that freaks me the hell out.

So anyway, I've got nothing against sleep, really. It's everything associated with it that I can't stand.

Decentralization VII: Definitions

I started this series of posts to try and get a better handle on what decentralization is, what it's good for, and what general situations require it. The level of centralization is an important characteristic of systems, but people don't always understand the tradeoffs that exist there. I think, at this point, that it all comes down to the division of control.

The definition I think I'm going to use: A system is decentralized in a certain aspect if control over that aspect is divided up over the components of the system. It's too vague to say that a system is a decentralized system without specifying what aspect you're talking about. Systems can be centralized in some aspects and decentralized in others, and in fact I think nearly all systems are a bit of both.

Mini case study: Blogspot has centralized ownership (Google) and code, along with centralized authentication (Mostly Google accounts, I think?) and centralized execution (runs on Google's servers). On the other hand, it has decentralized authorship (contrast with a newspaper or something like that), and participates in several decentralized protocols (linkbacks, RSS, etc). Contrast with Wordpress, which optionally has decentralized authentication and execution (you can run it on your own servers), and somewhat decentralized (open-source) code. Because of this, we can say that, broadly speaking, Wordpress is less centralized than Blogspot.

Systems can vary in the degree that they're decentralized. Federated systems, which I've mentioned before, have a set of independent servers which are decentralized, but clients connecting to the system don't have to worry about this and can just pretend they're connecting to a centralized system. (Contrast with p2p networks like Gnutella, where every user on the network is simultaneously a client and a server.) Once we understand decentralization as a division of control, it becomes clearer what's going on here: control is being divided among only the participants in the system that want to run servers, and thus reflects the reality that only a few users will actually want the responsibility that comes with that control.

Can we divide up control in more complex ways? Yes, but there's not a whole lot of benefit to it, and it increases the complexity of the system significantly. Simplicity is inherently valuable when it comes to code; complexity is usually a problem to be eliminated. I can't think of any computer systems right now that have more complex control hierarchies than federated systems - they almost certainly exist, but they're not common.

So what are the tradeoffs? Control is important in systems for both technical and business reasons, which aren't always the same. Twitter would definitely be more reliable if they made it more decentralized (more on robustness in a bit), but it would also impact their (nebulous) ability to turn a profit if they gave up control.

Why are decentralized systems more robust? There are a lot of factors that come into play here, really, so I don't have a clean answer yet. Let's look at some failure modes of systems. System overload is less of a problem in decentralized systems, because they're necessarily designed in more scalable ways, which makes it easier to throw hardware at the problem until it goes away. Hardware failure is also less of a problem, because systems that execute in a decentralized manner can be made immune to individual pieces of hardware failing more easily, Software bugs are less harmful in systems with decentralized codebases, because different implementations of the same protocols rarely have the same bugs.

Maybe this is the answer: centralization implies control, and control implies an opportunity for the one in control to make a mistake. If we define robustness as the number of mistakes or hardware failures that would have to occur to take the whole system down, or better yet the probability of a sufficient number of mistakes happening, it's easy to see why decentralized systems are robust. Thought experiment: if we had a system that was decentralized in such a way that any failure would break the system, we would have a system where decentralization made it far more fragile, rather than robust. Luckily, you'd have to be crazy to design something like that.

This is the last post in this series, I think - I've found what I was looking for.

Climategate

Is it just me, or is it kind of ridiculous the way every scandal in American politics is eventually referred to as something-gate?

For those of you that don't keep up with every little thing to happen in climate politics, somebody hacked into the servers of a climate research group the other week, and released an archive containing selected portions of the past 10 years of their email correspondence, and probably some other stuff too. Naturally, people were able to find all sorts of embarrassing stuff in there. The most talked-about email is one referring to a "trick" somebody used to combine two data sets, back in 1999 - this obviously proves that the entire field of climate research is a hoax, to hear people talk about it.

I won't be talking about any of the specifics of the leaked data, though, because I can't look at the source data in good conscience. Breaking into somebody's servers and putting over a decade of correspondence online for somebody's rivals to pore over is beyond reprehensible. It's especially bad in this case, when the rivals in question are playing politics and have very low standards for proof.

One particular issue that keeps cropping up is the removal of context. People will go and cherry-pick quotes (here is a recent and out-of-mainstream example), and somebody will eventually point out that the code in question only applied to one graph that was only used for "cover art". It's easy, when you're looking at correspondence over a span of many years, to find quotes that look bad out of context - but what does that actually prove?

Let's be miserly to the researchers here. Let's assume that some of these quotes really are as bad as they look out-of-context, that there really is a massive conspiracy to rewrite the data, which is somehow only evident in a few snippets. Even assuming the worst, what does this prove? This is only correspondence for a single institution, which is competing with several other groups - and yet the results all still point in the same direction. Should we posit that every group working on climate science is in cahoots, and engaged in a massive conspiracy? What scares me about this is that many people would say that we should.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but here's the impression I get watching the climate change debate. First, there are serious researchers, who (generally) agree that climate change is probably happening, and do actual work to figure out the extent of it. Second, there are the "green" cheerleaders on the political left, who say mostly inane, common-sensical things about global warming, and push for specific political/technical solutions (looking at you, Al Gore). Their hearts are generally in the right places, except for the ones that are only on this team because they've found a way to make a profit (I'm watching you, Al Gore).

Then there's the anti-global-warming crowd, made up of both right-wing political types and people reacting against the second group, who seem content to take random potshots at the first two groups indiscriminately, cry about conspiracies, and (like all conspiracy theorists) don't really care about having a consistent response to the people doing actual science. It's telling that there are almost no climate scientists in this group. (Members of this group will respond: "because of the conspiracy!", and thus prove my point.) This group is especially irritating to me, because they tend to be very anti-scientist.

Seriously, though - hacking people maliciously is bad enough, but calling it Whatevergate is just awful.

My room is not my room

In the tried and true tradition of people trying to come up with something under a deadline, I'm going to look around and write about the first thing that comes to mind.

I'm staying at home this weekend 'cos of Thanksgiving, and I'm realizing that my room no longer really feels like my room. Everything in the room, with the exception of a floppy red hat that I picked up this summer, is exactly as it was when I left a little over three years ago. Thanks to the ruthless forces of natural selection, everything I really care about has moved with me to my apartment, and everything else (a lot of plastic dinosaurs, for example) is stuff I simply don't need. I suppose you could say that my stuff has evolved.

After a series of ruthless throwings-away, just about everything is gone. Just like with archaeology, the only bits that are left from the 12-year or so span are the ones that happened to land or get stuck in favorable spots. Here's a jigsaw puzzle that's a National Geographic cover; we thought it looked neat so we framed it. I used to do huge jigsaw puzzles all the time with my mom, I wonder when that tradition died out. I kind of miss that.

Next to it is a set of collapsible shelves. I was never content with just having ordinary shelves, so I put them together in some weird way, with varying heights. The whole thing is kind of rickety since it was never supposed to work this way, but I kind of like it. I think it looks better this way, really - it's a pretty nondescript piece of white plastic furniture. There's a brown plastic Tyrannosaurus on the shelf. I've had it for as long as I can remember.

I should mention that all the posters on the wall are tilted by about 10-15 degrees. During some nonconformist phase (back in middle school, I think?) I went and made everything off-center, because I liked the way it looked. I probably would have done the furniture that way too, if it'd been feasible. They're all basically as they were when I left; the only poster I really cared to bring with me to college was a six- or seven-foot-tall picture of a Shuttle launch (it is pretty awesome).

Something that I'm realizing as I look around. The summer after eighth grade is when I got my own computer, and it's also when I really stopped caring what my room looked like, since I was spending a lot more time online and a lot less time in my room. There's almost nothing in here that reflects me after I started high school. Maybe that's part of the reason the room feels so alien to me now - it's largely still my room from eighth grade. That's kind of a depressing thing to realize. :/

At some point (probably next May) I'm going to have to move out of this room properly. I'll take down all the posters, clean out all the drawers, throw out whatever I don't want to bring with me, and officially return the room to its status as a guest bedroom. After that, I'll come back and visit this house, but I'm never going to live here again. That's another depressing thing to realize, but one that I'm going to try to come to terms with before it becomes painfully relevant in about six months. I've already started to refer to my apartment as home; I think that's a good first step.

Taking Back Chrome OS

Chrome OS is a pretty interesting platform, all the more so before it's open source. It's pretty strongly tied to Google right now, but there's nothing stopping me or anybody else from taking out all the Google-specific bits, and building up something new in their place. That's the interesting thing about open source - rather than being controlled by whoever wrote the software, it can go in directions that the creators may not have anticipated, and may not want.

The obvious first change would be to switch out the default browser - Firefox OS? Opera OS? This would depend on putting the X stack back into Chrome OS, since if I recall correctly Google dropped that. It's definitely possible, though. I think the harder part would be making the necessary modifications to the browser to allow it to be used as the sole interface to the system. Chrome can apparently view folders, and supports pinning web apps to a menu; I don't know if other browsers would want to do things exactly the same way, but they'd have to do something similar.

We could also switch in other non-browser applications. The command-line addict in me would love to have an OS that boots straight to a command line, and can connect to the internet so I can ssh. Having that on a netbook that I can carry around would be insanely useful. Application vendors could also create single-application systems as demos (and if they do, people will be trying out their apps running on Linux!).

Some people are going to ask what the point is. We already have much more capable Linux distros that can do the same thing, so what's the point? The interesting thing that Chrome OS adds is completely safe, transparent upgrades, and a read-only root. This has two humongous implications for the end-user: they don't have to worry about software upgrades ever, because the system auto-updates, and they can always reboot the system to get it back to a known-good state. Yes, this also means that you lose a lot of flexibility with the system; it's a tradeoff, and in many cases, the benefits of this outweigh the costs.

The core interesting idea of Chrome OS that we can use is the idea of "appliance computing". Looking at it a certain way, the OS really doesn't matter at all - what the user cares about is the application. Chrome OS, minus Chrome, gives us the necessary foundation to build completely stripped-down single-application systems. Obviously, this isn't going to be useful for everybody in all cases, but it's a pretty interesting idea to play around with.

I think the first step should be factoring out the "OS" part of Chrome OS. It'd be useful to have a core OS part, which automatically updates in the background, and an application part, as an image which is overlaid on the OS and contains the application. This way, there could be a single shared source for OS upgrades for all the different single-app systems. It would also make it pretty easy to make your own computing appliance, since you'd just have to package up the necessary files. There would need to be a dependency system so that version mismatches between the two parts don't cause problems, but this is a problem that Linux distros have explored pretty thoroughly.

This is kind of drifting into some ideas I've had about new ways that distros could be structured, but that's a whole other topic for a whole other post. ;)

Free electronic stuff!

This is going to be kind of awesome.

It's a really interesting idea for a promotion, actually - everybody loves free stuff, so the news that this is happening is going to be all over the place by January 7th. I, for one, am going to start planning a shopping list for that day well in advance, just in case I actually get the free stuff (they're capping the giveaway at $100k, which will probably dry up really quickly). If I don't get it, I might actually still buy the stuff - it depends on how I feel about whatever project I come up with.

I really want to build some kind of flying robot, dirigible-style. No idea how that's going to work, yet - ideally it'd be able to float mostly unpowered, so I'd either have to buy a lot of helium, or learn how electrolysis works (hydrogen rocks! :D). That's my tentative plan, anyway. We'll see how long it lasts. No matter what, I'm going to have some kind of plan come January 7th.

This sort of promotion ("hey, guys! free stuff!") would be really neat if more retailers started doing it, actually. Imagine if Newegg or Amazon just announced that 1% of orders on the site would be totally free. People really love lotteries, as history has shown, so this could be really effective. If I'm choosing between a deal offered on two sites, and one of them has a chance of giving me the order for free, I know who I'm buying from.

Anyway, short post today, because Thanksgiving is tomorrow! I've made cornbread and cranberry sauce so far. :D

Terrorists we need to watch out for

With the terror alert level pegged at Yellow (or Orange, if you're flying), and thousands of American troops in the Middle East fighting "terrorists", I think it's important that we know who the enemy is. Here are some prominent terrorists of the past few years:

* Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber - Despite the stringent security measures in place at airports, Reid did the unthinkable, and managed to smuggle a bomb aboard an airplane. After being admonished once by a flight attendant for lighting a match, he was later found struggling with a fuse, another match, and one of his shoes. Next time you have to take your shoes off at the airport, remember this: every air traveler has had to undergo this inconvenience for several years now, because of a terrorist that couldn't detonate his own bomb.

* Gary McKinnon, Super-hacker - The US government is currently trying to extradite this Extremely Dangerous man from the UK. McKinnon broke into nearly a hundred military computer systems during 2001 and 2002, using advanced hacker techniques such as guessing default or blank passwords. He used his access to top-secret computer systems to delete some files, and search for information on alien life, which he believe NASA and the US government were hiding. Gary McKinnon is one of the most credible cyber-terrorists discovered to date.

* Iyman Faris - Suspected of plotting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. This would have been a tremendous disaster, on several levels. Luckily, the plot involved cutting the bridge's support cables with an acetylene torch, which would have taken some pretty serious time and effort, since the cables are necessarily pretty sturdy, and consist of thousands of individual wires.

* Najibullah Zazi - One of the most recent terrorists uncovered in the US, Zazi received terrorist training directly from al-Qaeda, including instructions on bomb making. Had he managed to construct a bomb, he could have done some serious damage. Unfortunately for him, he failed to build a bomb despite nearly a year of repeated attempts. Nevertheless, this is hailed by some as the most serious terrorist plot uncovered in the US since September 11th.

* The Fort Dix attackers - Their entire plan was to show up at a military base and kill as many people as possible. This could have been a really serious plot, if they'd managed to acquire the weapons the plot required. However, they made a few fatal blunders: they videotaped themselves firing automatic weapons and talking about the plot, and then sent the footage to a Circuit City to get it made into a DVD. They also attempted to buy their weapons from an FBI informant.

* Star Simpson - While picking up a friend at the airport while wearing a homemade nametag with blinking lights, Simpson was arrested by officers carrying submachine guns. For a few days, the media was in a frenzy, gleefully reporting it as a threat with a "fake bomb". They stopped talking about the situation, naturally without any kind of retraction, once it became clear that she wasn't actually any kind of threat. I feel safer already!

So remember, folks: terrorists are people you need to be afraid of. The next time you see a major terrorist plot being reported on the news, pay attention to the details - given the media's track record in this area, it's far more likely that they alleged terrorist is incompetent, insane, or just plain innocent.