The Free Beer Speech House: discussing the meaning of the word “free”
Freedom, glorious freedom.
Once upon a time, I took a class based on a single question: “what is freedom?” We meandered through US history, identifying several distinct stages in the evolution of the definition of “freedom.” I was horrified to learn, during a discussion, that so many of my classmates wanted what I will call “freedom from information.” Ah yes – Professor Sandage had a way of bringing the ugliest truths to the surface, for all to witness.
On the one hand, I can understand this desire for freedom from information: telemarketing, advertising, spam, the scrolling headlines at the bottom of a newscast… well, any unsolicited attempt at selling things you don’t care about. On the other hand, I think we need more information instead of less, and we need effective tools to filter and manage that information so we only see what we care about.
The term “freedom” is muddied by historical contexts, but also through the process of etymological erosion. With that said, I want to take a moment to discuss the expression, “free as in speech, not beer.”
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My experience with semantic dementia, or how I am coping with my reformatted laptop
I just upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.5 and it’s great, but I hit one major snag along the way. Although I thought all of the Intel Macs shipped with the new GUID partition scheme, it seems like my early-generation Macbook Pro used the old Apple partition scheme, and unless I reformatted my drive as GUID, I couldn’t install 10.5. Fortunately, I spent the day backing up my old drive, so I just forged on, and once 10.5 was installed, I used the Migration Assistant to transfer my old home directory.
It worked… mostly. Partially by design, I chose to not migrate some command line tools, but now I find that every so often, I want to accomplish some task and I can’t … quite … do it, because I need to reinstall something, or perhaps reconfigure something. I’d say 95% of the old functionality is still there, but the remaining 5% comes up often enough that it feels like something more than 5%. The feeling is this lurking suspicion that I can’t trust my computer to do something that I know it used to be capable of, and it reminded me of a disease called Semantic Dementia. I don’t have semantic dementia in the sense of the neurological disease, but I’d like to start this off with a story about it.
In my handwriting, thousands of digits of Pi
in my handwriting, thousands of digits of pi
Yes folks, you have read that correctly. For obvious reasons, I felt it would be excellent to render Pi using my handwriting. And why not? After all, it’s a famous series of non-repeating digits; perhaps the most famous irrational number of all time.
How many digits are in this picture? I don’t know. I could count, but so could you. It’s thousands, however. Go ahead; zoom in. Count the digits. Look for errors, and if you find any (and if you make it easy for me to believe you) then I’ll do this over again… but I’m pretty sure it’s right. I based this work on the 100,000 Digits of Pi page.
Why was it important to do this in my handwriting? Because of “obviously.” …as in, the self-evidence of writing pi in the style of my own handwriting is axiomatic, and requires no justification. In fact, simply asking “why would anyone do this” is what needs to be justified.
So, there you have it. It’s Pi, and it’s my handwriting. There’s more to this story, but I shall leave that for another day.
