Saladified Wordings

Prompt: 

A Caesar salad word scramble cryptographic 

scrabble game night at a local diner greasy spoon. 

People still smoked in restaurants back then.

A typical intro to cryptography might be through Caesar Codes, which might be just offsets, mapping the alphabet to itself shifted left or right by some number of letters, going around a wheel. 

This is like a dance, with the drone looking down on two consecutive circles, say women facing out, men facing in. You start with your partner, home position, then the music begins and the men and women go into opposite rotational movements, clockwise and counter-clockwise. 

When the music stops, your new partner represents a letter-to-letter mapping, and so forth around the doubled circle. You’ve got yourself a Caesar Code.

The segue here to “word salad” coming from Caesar salad is tempting, given a next stop: a word scramble. Here we map letters to counterparts more arbitrarily than if circles were involved.  Start with your partner and now run around wildly until the music stops, and form a new pair. No dancers get added or subtracted so the male-female ratio stays 1:1.  

What if we don’t want to divide along gender lines? Who are we asking? It’s up to us. The point is to show off permutations in a group theoretical sense. Every letter and punctuation symbol, including the space character, gets remapped or stays the same. Permutations underlie group theory as the most general operation. To morph is to permute. From morphing arise isomorphisms, homomorphisms, and homeomorphisms… all manner of morphing.

From these examples, we might jump into cryptographic algorithms more generally, and also into hashing, i.e. creating cryptographic signatures from an object. The School of Tomorrow follows the many in going for RSA given its reliance on number theory concepts we want to hit anyway: Fermat’s Little Theorem, Euler’s Theorem, totient, totative, prime and composite. Strangers (relatively prime).

Crypto currency and version control infrastructure follow. Hashes zip blocks together, into chains. Cryptographic impenetrability may not be the point, simply A fits into B seamlessly, and so now we move on. Handshake complete.

What I’d bring into the meme pool at this point are mnemonic systems designed to hang together owing to cleverly optimized links. Memory palaces and like that.

Caesar and Scramble codes are about making the intelligible unintelligible, the visible invisible (in the sense of meaningless) until deciphered on the other end. But memory codes may have the opposite purpose: to render the invisible more amenable to conceptualization. 

The optimizations are not about concealing secrets so much as bringing them to light, but then the reader has to learn the language to bring that light to the equations. Flip the switch, and the tunnels become illuminated.

I think in some of these Indiana Jones type movies and/or narratives, what the explorers stumble upon was never about concealment in the conventional sense, any more than the dashboard of a car is attempting to be cagey or coy about what it displays. Yet the driver still needs to know how to read a dashboard, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning a language takes time.

On The Road

cl CogSci CC

Pet Peeve

What good is a blog if the blogger can't use it to vent from time to time? We use our journals for psychotherapy, some of us, some of us Quakers, who journal as a matter of religious practice. I always encourage Quakers to journal i.e. blog, as a part of their faith and practice. Most don't though. They never get over their paranoia about being semi-public with their thoughts.

The customer return lady was understably "I'm not a computer and can't recall all our changing policies, so you'll forgive me if I pick up the phone." And I did, immediately. What I was there for was to see about getting my money back (like $29.99) on a pair of Dataproducts print cartridges meant to emulate HP's 61s, black and tricolor. But does Fred Meyer except print cartridge returns anymore? She made the call. Answer: if the customer has opened it, then no, no refund, tell them to contact the vendor.

Walking home, none the richer, I was reminded of Walter Kaufmann for some reason, one of my teachers at Princeton. He was a firebrand, maybe making up for being short, and I recall a lecture where he criticized Kant for being petty about some chocolate he'd not be getting, because the ship had gone down with all hands. 

I know not to what event he was referring to, only that the message was Kant might not be deep, more like petty and blind to his own ethical blindness (aren't we all). He was an asshole basically (my words, not Kaufmann's, the latter's "Kantsipation" jokes notwithstanding). 

WK went on to say he wouldn't blame us if we thought Heidegger's stuff was pure puke. He never assigned us such vomit in any classes I took. I think he'd waded through Heidegger's stuff himself, poor guy.

So yeah... venting. Where was I?

Rewinding (flash back): I unclipped the plastic shields on each cartridge, which was all I was supposed to do, and put them in their Envy 4500 series ink jet printer cradles. No dice. I was informed these cartridges were non-performant.

"Did you remove the tape?" the printer asked (paraphrase), not in a human voice but on its tiny screen. 

"What tape?" I was thinking, "you mean the plastic clips? Yeah, I did that already" (the printer wasn't listening, I was just thinking out loud).

So what "tape" was the printer talking about? 

The cartridges have some tape on them, and a signature "do not remove this chip" warning. So is the chip behind the tape? I'll be sure not to remove any chip, but I will remove this tape, obeying the printer.

Wrong! The tape is the chip in question, or rather a chip is integral with the tape, which is also a little circuit board. 

But then it wasn't working anyway, before my faux pas. Your honor, I draw the court's attention to my having followed instructions correctly, at least until I didn't, and started trusting my printer.

So Fred Meyer should take the remanufactured inkjet cartridges back right? 

No, it's really my job to complain to Dataproducts -- which is what I'm doing, indirectly. Actually I'm complaining to the whole printer ink industry, which smells as rotten as the Kingdom of Denmark did, to Hamlet that time.

I then found authentic HP 61s, a pair of XLs, for only a few dollars more, but like for much more ink. "Free" delivery (I pay for Prime). Duh. That's the way to get my ink from now on, right?

I also got an extra long shoehorn, good for seniors who don't always have as easy access to their feet as they once did.

People need to stick up for themselves. 

Remember the emperor with no clothes story? What is the moral of that story anyway? It's that people are cowards and won't speak up in a crowd, out of fear of what peers might say or do in retaliation. Only an innocent child, semi-clueless, daring to be naive, manages to blurt out what's on everyone's mind e.g. what was so great about German Idealism anyway?

Noticing England

In addition to the hot war conflagrations that are going on in the eastern hemisphere, aided and abetted by remote cheerleading on our side (western hemisphere), I'm tracking the British scene to some level. 

At this time, right before a meetup at top of the hour, I'm aware of judicial branch action to oust a gangster class, the lawyers around the world starting to realize they're not in control and really, have probably never been in control if we get right down to it, to the pirate layer (see OMSE).

So someone high up in the powdered wig class (what was that movie -- Divergent), told the PM to step down, given all the forensics going on, all the pickling and displaying in museums of the future. Nope, gangsters aren't managed by the powdered wig class, never have been. Gangsters have control of the armies, after all. The White House was eager to show it could set Marines against popular uprisings.

When I say "gangsters" I'm quoting Jeffrey Sachs in a YouTube I was taking in while in the kitchen about an hour back. Yesterday I met with some visiting faculty, and before that David and I were doing our usual BBQ with Fred Meyer burger and Franz kaiser buns. Lots of raspberries. Good weather.

The consequence of privatizing everything and taking government behind the scenes, out of sight of the people, is that you lose the perception that those in charge have anything to do with who's elected. There's taxation, lots of that, but no representation. 

Ever since Citizens United (nonperson personhood citizens), the system has been run by literally soulless creatures: the bots put out by a Dr. Frankenstein legal system, per the Thom Hartmann tome, Unequal Protection.

The same invisible hands keep control of the steering wheel, no matter what the passengers want. That sense of being hijacked runs pretty deep with people, leaving presidents as so much window dressing, and Congress a set of weighted nodes in some DL trained to recognize... 

I dunno, Congress seems in a rush to embrace bad ideas with gusto so I can't really figure out what it's for. I'm sure a lot of you would be able to provide some lectures on the topic. I remember the old theories, from when we followed a constitution. But today? You tell me.

No Kings

I’m ignoring the “tinky tank parade” in the District, other low quality melodrama, and heading out to a hacky sack tournament. That’s my idea of a real summer.

On the way, though, I’ll check out one of the more far flung No Kings rallies, a franchised operation conducting itself nationally, a reminder from the populace that we recognize no monarchy.  

Kings of old could embroil their serfs in wars as cannon fodder no problem, in feuds by proxy. We came to a New World to get away from those guys.

Since I’m on a tight itinerary, I have to avoid the larger No Kings rallies downtown and along MLK, and pick one more aligned with my route and goals. The hacky sack tournament is actually also a chance to rendezvous with one of the faculty I keep blogging about.

I’ll likely be seeing him again later in the week, along with Casey, and later Ryan, as we’re engaging in a kind of mini-summit around the Summer Solstice.

The three of us, me, Don and Dave, attended the final meetup this term of the Dead Mathematician Society at MHCC, for a brilliant talk on Group Theory, Burnside's Lemma, complete with table top game like activities.

I’ve been communicating with the organizers about doing my Quadrays talk or something like it, and did some brainstorming on what we’d do for a tabletop game. I was thinking BRYG and “how would you, if the designer, bridge XYZ and the IVM.” In a way, that’s not a new problem, but the Quadrays aspect makes it more number crunchy.

If you’re new to my blogs, here’s fair warning I’m one of those Americans who mocks The District as a soap opera capital far less talented than LA when it comes to screenwriting. West Wing melodramas really suck. I’m so glad I don’t waste a lot of time with its products, not that the ripple effects can always be avoided.

Bioregionally, we’re Cascadians out here with our Pacific Rim identity. We’re not “Atlanticists” as they’re called, mostly a lotta prep school prima donnas with east coast breeding. Like what we used to call Yankees. I mostly just call ‘em Anglos. They’re still living in the eastern hemisphere in their own heads, thinking the whole world revolves around their Old World fantasies.

Post Travel Debriefing

Yes I got to reconnect with Russell Chu, and see Deb's new place for the first time, in South Seattle. 

Being in that neighborhood with the both of them (Liana at work) brought back memories of our many visits when the kids were young, and of our mini-summit of geometricians and mathematicians, whatever you wanna call us, cultists, back around the time of Java One in the Bay Area. 

Java the computer language was just being kicked off and Gerald de Jong came all the way from the Netherlands to help celebrate is new freedoms, as a former C++ programmer.

Depicted: some of Deb's glass work and, that blue ball on the right: that's the fishing float from Lincoln City gifted to Deb during the fishing float finding festival. They're made locally and finders should remember to register their findings using the number. 

They're called fishing floats because at one time actual Made in Japan glass fishing net floats, a technology no longer favored by the fishing industry, used to wash up this side of the Pacific Rim. Nowadays it's up to glass-working artists to make them and Deb Kasman is a glass-working artist, explaining why she was there.

Regarding the driving experience: in the week prior to departure, my car failed to start after a private screening of The Great Gatsby (DiCaprio interpretation) some miles from my digs. AAA had only a skeletal crew that night so rather than wait, I bussed home, and got the new battery the next day.

Having a new battery has solved all my short term problems, but in the longer term we know said battery will have a shorter life if we don't diagnose why it's losing juice even when turned off. That's not an uncommon issue with older cars and people not driving often will disconnect the battery to prevent draining. Driving the car is a way of recharging it.

Maxi Taxi sat idle for over 24 hours as we took the Mustang EV to and from the birthday party.

Russ and I reminisced about folks we'd both overlapped with, such as Robert Orenstein, a contemporary of Koski's and Bonnie's and me, during the chapter when BFI (Buckminster Fuller Institute) was based in Los Angeles, where D. W. Jacobs lives to this day, and Victor Acevedo. J. Baldwin loved LA. My sis lives in Whittier and I plan to visit her later this summer.  Robert died in the SARS2 epidemic, in Uganda.

Birthdays

Alice and Mary

I’m on my north circuit as another relative’s odometer flips. 

Uncle Bill’s flipped to 100 a few weeks ago. Yesterday, cousin Alice’s flipped to 70, the same day as Tara’s flipped to 31. We’re celebrating today. Catered tacos. Homemade cake. Tara joined us on FaceTime.

While we’re talking family, I’ll chronicle my dog’s adventure. She’s on her farm not far from here, where she lived before joining my household, a gift to Carol, my mom, who missed having a dog, as did I.

Tomorrow, I’ll retrieve her from her farm and take her home. Syd has mostly recovered from “old dog vestibular disease” about which YouTube has any number of videos.

The plan, let’s hope it works, is to stop south of Seattle on my way home to visit with old friends. 

There’s a high probability I’ll reconnect with Russ Chu, my best man at my wedding to my wife Dawn Wicca, at Rhododendron Garden near Reed College, some 32 years ago. I haven’t seen him in a long time.

We used to talk for hours about “the four IVMs” and other Synergetics-related topics. His name is in the literature here and there, and in my YouTubes (see my Graph Theory 2025).

I’m staying these two nights with cousin Mary, Alice’s sister. Their mother, Evelyn, was a sibling of Uncles Bill, Eddy, Howard and Bo Lightfoot. 

Howard’s son Lee is here, and his wife Julie. I’m the grandson of Evelyn’s mother, Elsie’s sister, Esther Urner, wife of Carl mother of Jack.