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.”

Free as in speech, not beer

“Free as in speech, not beer” is an expression that comes up in open source discussions all the time.  It’s a little hard to unpack, unless you really dig into the dual meaning of the word “free.”  Thanks to Wikipedia, we’re part of the way there: the word “free” is used to mean two things: Gratis versus Libre.  We call both of these terms “free” nowadays, but once upon a time, there were different words because they are totally different concepts.  Gratis means “without charge” whereas Libre is more like “liberty” or “freedom.”

So what is free speech?  Of course, that’s the freedom to say what you want (so long as you accept the consequences for what you’ve said).  And free beer?  Well, that would mean beer that is provided at no cost.  I think the key is this: although you are free to say what you want, you could well end up in court for it (e.g. slander) and your expression won’t come free of charge.  On the flipside, you can provide beer free of charge, but not to someone who is 15 years old, so you may not freely provide beer to anyone you wish.

In other words, speech embodies Libre (but not necessarily Gratis) perfectly.  Likewise, beer embodies Gratis very well, at the same time that beer is so closely regulated by many governments that it is hardly “libre.”  Nevertheless, everybody likes a good party with some beer pro gratis.

The Free House, and the Public House

Speaking of free beer, the Free House is definitely not a place to find such a zero-cost beverage.  For starters, the term Free House is mostly British, and always beer-related.  It refers to a Public House (which you may know as a “pub”) that will sell any kind of beer they can get people to buy.  Contrast this with a Tied House, which sells beer manufactured by a single brewer, and you find that the Free House will have several brands on tap.  Here, the term “Free” is more like Libre, and is used in the context of the “free market.”  …and we all know that the free market isn’t composed of things that are zero-cost.

When I was living in Berkeley, California there were two particularly good “Tied House” pubs that brewed and sold only their own brands of beer: Jupiter and Triple Rock.  I should also mention Pyramid, which had a pretty cool restaurant with their own beverages on tap.  This kind of pub is fun because they’ll often have a sampler option to let you taste a small glass of everything they brew.  It’s a great way to experience the full spectrum of beers, but a word of advice: start with the lightest stuff and progress towards darker.  The one exception to this rule is for hoppy beverages (e.g. IPA or APA), which might be light but which may have a pronounced bitter taste.  You might want to close it off with an APA, even after drinking the stouts.

Open Source Software

There’s nothing that goes quite so well with open source software as a tasty hoppy beverage.  I like pairing Stone Brewing Company’s Arrogant Bastard with GnuPG, the open source implementation of Phil Zimmerman’s PGP (pretty good privacy) software.  Another favorite of mine is the Spaten Optimator paired with Wordpress.  More recently, I’ve taken a liking to Unibroue, the French Canadian brewer, who offers such brews as Tres Pistoles, which is an excellent complement to Python.  This last combination is probably the most dangerous of the group, because you might end up with excellent code, and you might end up with British comedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python

In the end of the day, free speech and free beer have a lot to do with open source software.  You see, licenses such as the GNU General Public License actually permit developers to charge for their software, while simultaneously requiring all GPL software to be published with its source code.  In this sense, the “free beer” part means the software isn’t necessarily without cost, and the “free speech” part means you are required to publish the source code.  In other words, the Libre aspect of the GPL has an important restriction: you are not free to not publish the source code, which in turn provides the most fundamental tenet of open source software: you are free to read and distribute the source code.

I want to hedge my previous statement: the GPL is a famous topic of debate, so there’s plenty of room to criticize anyone who says anything – at all – about the GPL or about open source software, either according to the letter of the license, or according to the spirit of the movement.

Let me sum it up like this: “free” means many things to many people throughout many time-periods, but for some reason, it almost always comes down to a matter of speech and beer.

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.

Rumelhart and McClelland

Back in 2002, I was taking a class called something like “Cognitive Neuroscience” from Carl Olson and Jay McClelland.  I already knew  about McClelland’s work from a previous class on neural networks, which relied heavily on a textbook written by McClelland and his former colleague Rumelhart.  While the neuroscience class was fascinating, the most salient memory I have of the class involves a fairly personal reflection by McClelland on the current state of Rumelhart.

Although Rumelhart is relatively young (aged 67, as of 2009) he suffers from a form of semantic dementia called Pick’s Disease (or, if it’s not a form of semantic dementia, it’s related to it).  In any case, Pick’s Disease is a neuro-degenerative disorder.  The deep irony of this is that in the 1980s, Rumelhart and McClelland provided the first and possibly still-best description of neural networks, which could only have come from a profound insight into how the brain functions.

I can’t say much about what Rumelhart thinks of his disease, but I know McClelland thought about it, and if I’m not mistaken, this ultimately lead to a bridge between neural networks and an older model of semantic cognition called ISA networks.  As I recall it, it’s in terms of ISA networks that semantic dementia can be understood, which provides an intuitive way to describe how categories of items can become indistinct.

Consider: is a cat an animal?  Is a bird an animal?  Is a canary a bird?  Is a penguin a bird?  Is a penguin an animal?  It’s when we say “a penguin ISA bird,” and “a bird ISA animal” that we’re establishing categories, but lots of categories have weird and one-of-a-kind rules that lead us to say, “a penguin is a bird, even though it doesn’t fly” or “even though a cat is an animal that doesn’t fly, it is not a bird.”  Kids have to learn this through trial and error (e.g. a horse has four legs, but it isn’t a cat).

from http://www.uark.edu/misc/lampinen/sm.html

Semantic dementia is a condition where concepts lose their meaning, and a possible explanation for this comes from the inability to categorize concepts anymore.  This might have to do with making new distinctions between concepts, and it might relate to the retrieval of concepts that were previously distinct.  I think of semantic dementia as being like a car crash victim who is paralyzed and unable to communicate with the world, even though they are not cognitively impaired in any other way.  I imagine semantic dementia as being the frustrating condition of “knowing” what you want to say, but being unable to find the right words to say it.  Maybe it’s like having every word on the “tip of your tongue” and trying to construct sentences in spite of it.

Corrupted Greenthink

Earlier this year, I read a book by Vernor Vinge called Marooned in Realtime about life in a post-singularity enclave.  First off, I recommend Marooned in Realtime highly, but the book contains a cautionary tale about relying on an external system to store your personal database.  Whereas humans once kept their thoughts in their brains, and later turned to notebooks for assistance, in the MiR universe the pinnacle of personal database technology is called Greenthink.  While Greenthink has some similarities to 2009’s Wikipedia, I think it also includes personal notes, and presents a deeply personalized interface for interacting with these information objects.

Because the characters in MiR departed from Earth at different times over the span of about a century, and because technology continued to improve at an exponential rate, those who departed 10 years later benefited from vastly superior technology than those who were 10 years earlier.  One of the characters is so advanced as to be barely recognizable as a human, and this character has the deepest and most integrated relationship with Greenthink.

At one point, another character tries to use the futuristic Greenthink database, but since they were familiar with an older version of Greenthink, the interface is so foreign and personalized that they are unable to accomplish much of anything.  With some practice, they get up to speed, but the learning curve is steep.  During a fascinating future-combat scene, parts of Greenthink are corrupted, and the futuristic character struggles to retrieve information objects that were previously available.

Again, this reminds me of semantic dementia.  In the case of Greenthink it’s the retrieval cues that no longer lead to the right information objects; perhaps the interface doesn’t link correctly, perhaps the “menus” don’t have the right choices, or perhaps the choices are all there but the information objects aren’t there.  Whatever the case is, the character is frustrated and somewhat crippled by the inability to “think” the way they are used to, or to think at the speed they are accustomed to.

Although Vinge wrote Marooned in Realtime back in 1986, it is startling prescient.  As is the case with many series, I only found out too late that MiR is the third book in the Across Realtime trilogy, and I haven’t read the first two books yet.

Thinking in real-time

I can imagine some of the frustration of semantic dementia, or with aphasia (another language disorder), in terms of the amount of time it takes to accomplish something.  I definitely don’t think this provides any insight to the disorders themselves, but just consider the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon.  There’s a word that means something, and you know exactly what that thing is, but you just can’t think of the word.  If it weren’t that you are in the middle of a conversation, there would be no problem with sitting down to ponder the concept until you remember precisely the word you were looking for.  However, there’s another person waiting for you to finish your thought, and you are so compelled to express what it is that you have to say.  This results in a feeling of frustration, because it’s so irritatingly imprecise to not have access to the word you need, to the extent that it won’t do justice to the concept you are expressing.

In other words, we like to think and talk in real-time, but when something delays us, we get frustrated.  Likewise, I like to compute in realtime, and I strongly doubt I’m alone on this one.  Although I have many stories about my frustration with an early-1990s 286 computer (which I used until about 1996), I experienced the same problem in 2006 with my shiny new laptop.  It showed up with 512MB of RAM, which was not my intention.  I waited several months to upgrade to 1GB, but during this time-period, I experienced the profound frustration of swap disk hell.  Let me explain.

You might think of computers as a pyramid of buckets, where the fewest buckets at the top of the pyramid are the fastest to put things into and to get things out of.  As you go down the pyramid, you find that the buckets are both more numerous and also slower.  At the top of this pyramid is the storage that is physically located on the CPU; this is very small and extremely fast (called L1 Cache).  Depending on your CPU type, there might be two more levels of storage here (called L2 and L3), and just slightly slower is that type of storage called RAM.  Almost at the bottom of the pyramid is the hard drive, which is about 1000 times slower than RAM, but is correspondingly cheaper and much larger.

So there I was, using a totally modern machine that had way less RAM than it needed.  To run some software quickly might require lots of RAM, but if you don’t have that, modern operating systems elegantly “swap” data from RAM to the hard disk.  Recall that the hard drive is 1000 times slower than RAM, so swapping can be a very slow process.  However, this is much better than being restricted from running certain software because there isn’t enough RAM.

My typical usage pattern required vastly more RAM than I had available, such that I had to wait as much as 30 seconds to switch from my web browser to my word processor.  If I were leisurely wasting time, I might not mind this so much, but the fact of the matter is that I was working really hard at the time, and I didn’t have time for all of those 30-second delays.  As a result, I was frustrated, which is really an understatement.  I was able to think so much faster than my computer, and it felt like I was crippled somehow because I wasn’t free to think as fast as I wanted.  I call these 30-second delays “swap disk hell.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve maxed out my laptop at 2GB, and I’m quite happy, because I’ve caught back up with real-time.

The tip of the fingers phenomenon

On Thursday, I upgraded to OS X 10.5, and as I said, I migrated about 95% of my old functionality to the new system.  It’s that lingering 5% that comes up way more often than it should.  The 5% of the time that I try to do something (say, run a Python script I rely on) but I find that I can’t, it’s at once surprising (since I can’t predict when it will happen) and frustrating (since it will invariably delay me from accomplishing my task).

In some senses, this is like the tip of the tongue problem: I know what I want to do, and I could describe exactly what needs to happen, but I am looking for the command to actually accomplish my goal and the command just isn’t there.  It’s like a corrupted Greenthink database, and the frustration is just as bad as living in swap disk hell.  It’s like thinking and knowing everything you always used to know, and finding that it just doesn’t matter how it used to work, because it doesn’t work that way anymore.  This leads to suspicion and distrust, like I can’t totally rely on my ability to think anymore, because my thoughts don’t map onto actions the way they used to.

Semantic dementia can be a progressive disease, meaning it doesn’t necessarily happen all at once, and instead comes on in degrees.  Over time, I will rehabilitate my computing environment to be back at 100% – this is one sense in which my problem is totally unlike semantic dementia, because I can recover from reformatting my computer.  Really, there are many senses in which everything I’ve said is just a metaphor for semantic dementia; I don’t know what it’s like, and even what I do know about it is still quite different from what I am experiencing now.

Still, in everything that I do, I find that I hesitate slightly, since I am not certain I will accomplish the goal I have in mind as long as my computer is partially corrupt.  This is the “tip of the fingers phenomenon” … and the only cure is the slow and deliberate process of rehabilitation.

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.