Book / movie / TV reviews

Breaking Bad -- an AMC series about an average middle-class American father/husband, a chemistry teacher in ABQ, who learns he has lung cancer and less than a year to live. To leave his family (a wife pregnant with an unexpected child fairly late in her child-bearing years, and a son with cerebral palsy) with some financial security, he turns to the methamphetamine trade. This is one of the best television shows of the decade; the character studies are amazing -- what happens when you strip a man of all of his virtues but loyalty to his family? How far will he go? The writers and producers of the show very clearly know what it is like to have a loved one suffering a chronic illness, and for those of you who have had to prematurely become caretakers for terminally ill family members, or who have become unexpectedly disabled and lost your independence due to an illness, this will be gut-wrenching in its authenticity. It was for this reason that I found the show so compelling, as well as difficult to watch; when I first showed signs of the illness I have been battling the last few years, my doctors considered many possible diagnoses, one of which was cerebral vasculitis. I am happy to say that that hypothesis has been ruled out (by virtue of my still being alive, among other things), but there was a period of several months where my wife and I had to seriously consider that I might have had less than six months to live. Even if you haven't had a first-hand experience with this sort of thing, the character of Walt is hard not to like, or to identify with on some level, despite the immoral and horrendous things he comes to accept as part of his new identity. The show is, in many ways, a contest between a man's desire to do what is right, vs. his need to do right by his family, and the many moments when he is faced with a fork in the road, a decision requiring him to mortgage his soul in the hopes of providing for those he cares about, are likely to leave the viewer cold. I highly recommend this to just about everyone.


The Old Man's War series, by John Scalzi -- the first book in this series is one of the best science fiction war novels I have ever read, along side Starship Troopers and The Forever War. It's hard to pick a favorite among the books in the series, though if pressed I would have to say The Last Colony would get my vote. If any of you believe that treason is never the right course of action, this book offers a strong counterpoint to that view. "I might not have the authority, but I do have the right." Doing what is right for one's county and one's people does not always mean obeying one's government; sometimes, defiance is the only moral course of action.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman -- a fairly bleak future war story, both a reflection on Vietnam, in which the author served, and a timeless criticism of war in general, and the deceit that military leaders perpetrate upon the civilian population. Its applicability to present-day war politics is depressing, in that it reveals just how little the military-based economy has changed, and how little we've learned about the willingness of desk-jockey generals and pencil-pushing accountants to destroy the lives of thousands of people, soldiers and civilians on both sides of a conflict. This book should be required reading for anyone considering enlisting in the US Army -- perhaps it will make them think twice about joining such a corrupt and immoral institution, or at least prepare them for the lies they will be fed.

The Global Frequency (TV Pilot) -- an adaptation of Warren Ellis's brilliant graphic novels, it sadly never aired. I can't say I am terribly surprised, as it was greenlit by the WB, not exactly known for its intelligent programming. I have slim hope that another station might pick it up, but it's been four years since the pilot, so it is likely dead. A pity -- as a fan of the comics, I was wary of a TV adaption, but it showed immense promise.

Permutation CIty, by Greg Egan -- a rather interesting book exploring themes of virtual reality, the nature of consciousness, and most interesting to me, the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, aka the Ultimate Ensemble Theory. I have spent the last several years contemplating the nature of consciousness, lately from information theoretic and algorithmic information theory standpoints, and a lot of my own theories line up with the MUH ideas, of which I had previously been unaware. I have more reading to do.

Meta Math!, by Gregory Chaitin -- I have read most of Professor Chaitin's academic papers and technical books, though they are likely not very accessible to people without at least a basic level background in complexity theory or information theory, and a knowledge of LISP concepts helps. This is his popular science (or pop math?) book, aimed at a broader audience, and it is exceptionally well written and quite accessible. I believe Chaitin to be the most important scientific thinker of our time, carrying the torch passed from Leibniz to Godel, Turing, Church, and even Einstein. It is Chaitin's mathematics that will bring the MUH paradigm into general acceptance if it is ever to be generally accepted. If you want to know where the frontiers of math and reality lie, read this book.

Gran Torino -- Clint Eastwood's unexpected return to acting, this movie makes an excellent coda for the actor's career. It is a movie about redemption, self-sacrifice, and overcoming one's prejudices. The production values of the film are superb, the acting amazing, and the authenticity above reproach. 

Post a comment Tags: reviews, war, mathematics, movies, novels, reality, physics, libertarianism …

My friend Kali...

... has managed to finally get a service dog matched up to her needs, but she lacks the money needed to pay for him at this point. I've asked my friends if they can help; it's really not that much that she has left to raise, when crowd-sourced. I've not written about her on my public blog, and the reason I'm doing so now is because of skepticism from people on Reddit. I've known Kali for over three years; my wife has known her for far longer. I can personally attest to the truth of her statements in the blog she started for the purpose of discussing her life with her newly diagnosed disability.


Let me just take this moment to remind y'all that, while the Internet may be riddled with scammers, not every cry for help is a scam, and for the people who have to live with chronic, painful, severely limiting disabilities, being called out as a scammer can't feel very good.

That's all I have to say on that matter. As for Kali, she's continuing to persevere with her law school studies, and while her disability -- one that arose after she'd moved across the country to attend school -- may limit her ability to be a trial lawyer, or other paths of future employment that most people look toward upon graduating with their JD, I'm convinced that she'll find a role that allows her to do what she's wanted to do with her law degree -- help people.

She's been a wonderful friend to me and to my wife, and to our friends simply because they are our friends. Anyone who has doubts about the legitimacy of her need in this situation has to call me a scammer too if they're unwilling to accept what she's posted as truth.

While this post if mostly for the benefit of the skeptics over at Reddit, I do ask that any of you who can help with her service dog fund, to please do so. Her blog tells the details, and has a donation button for the country of your choice, so I won't repeat it all here.

Thank you,


Len Sassaman

Post a comment Tags: scams, disabilities, reddit, service dogs, non-scams

CodeCon 2009 is in full swing

Here's a last-minute announcement for those of you who are interested but might have forgotten -- CodeCon 2009 is happening this week, with the all-new Biohack! track -- we've got some wonderful programming/code projects, as well as some great synthetic biology projects done by individual gene hackers and similar species of geeks. Come on up to San Francisco and join in the fun -- or, if you can't make it, listen to the online stream. Check out the CodeCon website for more info.


Post a comment Tags: san francisco, geeks, hacking, biohacking, cellspace, codecon, diybio …

CodeCon 2009

This is just a brief post to remind everyone that CodeCon is coming up -- entering its 6th year and following a 2 year hiatus, the conference that Bram Cohen and I started back in 2002 has grown and changed a bit over the years (for example, this year we're showcasing synthetic biology projects as well as programming work, and the venue is all-ages), but the core principles -- that all presentations must have a working demo, be presented by a lead developer in the project, and admission must never be more than $100 for the entire conference -- have remained.


I'll post more about this in the next few days, but in the mean time, please wander over to the program and check out this year's presentations. If you're planning to attend, I suggest registering online (available until the 15th) for the cheapest rates.

I'm quite excited about this one, folks, and I hope you are too!

Post a comment Tags: san francisco, geeks, tech, codecon

Facebook is kind of creepy

I don't mean to be a web-stalker, but... every few years, curiosity gets the better of me, and I Google the name of my first girlfriend. I haven't really spoken to her since shortly after her junior prom. I'm not sure what happened between us... the relationship just sort of died.


Facebook informs me that she's married now. Has a really cute kid. A handsome husband. Looks like she's got a PhD in pharmacology. I think she and Meredith would really hit it off, if she's anything like she was ten years ago.

It's funny. Back then, she wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to be a novelist. She got closer to her high-school career goal than I did -- not that I'm complaining about my career.

Honestly, I miss our friendship. I tried emailing her twice over the last decade, and got no response. Maybe she didn't get the emails, maybe she didn't want to talk to ghosts. But N., if you ever stumble across this, and want to get back in touch, please let me know. I know I'd like to hear from you.

Post a comment Tags: geeks, getting old, lost friends, webstalking

Greetings LiveJournal Users

I've been meaning to play with OpenID for numerous reasons, some of which I'll post more about at length here later -- but as an exercise in both getting the user experience of OpenID, and capitalizing on the much better social-network functionality of LiveJournal vs. Vox, I've gone and "friended" a bunch of people I know / am friends with / share friends with / find interesting. If you'd like me to read your posts/be able to comment, I believe you can friend me back just like a normal LiveJournal user. 


Of course, this is a softball pitch test of OpenID; it was invented by the LiveJournal team, and Livejournal was for a time owned by the company that runs Vox. So it really out to work quite well between these two sites. I'm sure I can find things to complain about, though. Stay tuned!

Post a comment Tags: livejournal, security, openid, trouble, protocols

Attacks on the Pynchon Gate's use of BitTorrent

This is neat. A Stanford student (Fred Wulff) has done an analysis of The Pynchon Gate for what appears to be a final exam (or maybe final project?) in this course.


The paper spends some time beating around the bush with the traffic analysis issues concerning spam; yes, you can try to flood a nym, and if the server passes variable amounts of traffic through to the user, you can correlate input and output. This is a problem with all nym servers, as we showed in the paper, and is why Pynchon is designed to query once a day and (hopefully) request a bucket size larger than the incoming messages. The ability to review an index of messages was something that was first proposed during discussions about Underhill, the SURB-based nym-server for Mixminion, and it is intended to be used as a last resort. Yes, we waste bits by making a large fixed-size bucket request each time; it's that, or let the traffic amounts fluctuate (you don't even need spam for this.) And finally, given the once-a-day request, timing of responses to flame wars isn't an issue. 

(In Wulff's defense, we did talk about allowing different bucket sizes for different users, as long as the buckets stayed the same size for the user, and we hadn't completely made up our minds that users should be requesting an identical number of buckets each time (I don't think; honestly, I need to re-read the paper.) But as it stands now, the spam attack won't work except to potentially DOS a user, and the attack he pointed out is pretty much the same as the attack we showed against SURB and MURB-based nym servers in Nick's section demonstrating that incoming non-malicious spam kills the anonymity of a user of nym.alias.net if the passive attacker can watch the nym-server and the end-user.)

Spam handling in Pynchon, in general, is a much more serious open question -- what sort of policies should the nym server have for blocking/filtering inbound spam? If it is at all worthwhile as an anonymity service, it's going to be holding 10s to 100s of thousands of email addresses, all getting V1aGRA L0tt3ry spam. What do we do about that?

He raised some points about denial of service, but didn't mention the Byzantine distributor problem except as a passing reference to "the Byzantine postman recovery procedure suggested by the followup", which is sort of odd -- why DOS a user when you can DOS the whole network? Had he not made reference to the followup paper by the fairly unique name, I'd have thought he hadn't read it. (Note that while the Byzantine Postman problem has been published, we haven't settled on a solution yet, and the paper he is referring to is a technical report. I hope to have a protocol I am happy with "soon", since we'd like to get this beyond the prototype stage and into deployment after all these years, but I'm still poking sticks at it.)

But where his paper gets interesting (for me) is the bit about BitTorrent attacks. The amount of time Bram and I spent thinking about that part of the system was fairly limited. The intention was to borrow a BitTorrent-like protocol (ideally unmodified BitTorrent, but we haven't gotten that far in our implementation of the system to know for sure) for the transfer of the databases, with the collator operating as the "tracker" in this setting. Obviously using a public tracker would be inviting mayhem, but Wulff shows that BitTorrent itself may not be up to the challenge.

Wulff presents a Byzantine distributor-based attack in which the honest distributors are prevented from obtaining the full database (and thus effectively taken off-line during their update phase), while the malicious distributors get the entire database, and increase their chances of comprising the full set of distributors the user queries (and breaking the user's anonymity). Basically, he's saying by including BitTorrent in the protocol, we've given the attacker a means of rendering arbitrary distributors incapable of answering queries while the attacker's distributors are still able to. Oops.

This isn't that surprising of a result, given that the priorities of BitTorrent, and the priorities of Pynchon's bandwidth-sparing protocol, are rather different: BitTorrent needs to make sure first and foremost that individual file chunks never become extinct from the cloud, and secondly that the chunks get to where they need to go as efficiently as possible. Pynchon, on the other hand, has a dedicated seeder that is completely reliable, is more concerned with actual bandwidth usage rather than latency, and has additional security concerns. BitTorrent wasn't designed for the Pynchon model, and Wulff's analysis shows that to be a problem. 

And, indeed, it is an interesting problem. I can see some higher-level protocol ways of handling this, but more interesting would be to make BitTorrent more robust against Byzantine servers. I have to think on that one. (I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about how to improve BitTorrent against Byzantine agents, actually, but not for the Pynchon use-case -- just the regular BitTorrent user scenario.) It might make sense to simply start from basic principles here and design a bandwidth-sparing protocol for Pynchon without the BitTorrent assumptions.

Post a comment Tags: bittorrent, anonymity, nym servers, the pynchon gate

Memorial service for est

We finally have a date/venue secured for Eric Tiedemann's memorial service. Details are below:



What: 
Memorial service for Eric
When: 
Sunday, 15 June 2008 from 1900 to 2300
Where: 
Cellspace
2050 Bryant St.
San Francisco, CA
(phone number of the venue: +1-415-648-7562)
RSVP: Meredith L. Patterson (clonearmy-at-gmail)

Cellspace is a nice venue for this, I think. There will be a dancing area and an area for quiet reflection. Children are welcome, as this is a non-drinking event consistent with the sort Eric enjoyed most. I hope most of you who knew Eric can be there.


(Thanks much to everyone who helped plan this, especially Meredith for all her efforts finding a venue, and thanks in advance to all of you who come out to celebrate Eric's life.)

1 comment Tags: san francisco, memorial, est, eric tiedemann, eric s. tiedemann

Update on Eric

I've returned to Belgium after spending three weeks in the Bay Area. I can't list everything that happened, though it was quite a busy, and sad, trip.


Eric's body was cremated last Saturday. I don't know if there are firm plans on what will happen to his ashes, but cremation was what he had told several people he wanted. (He appears to not have left a will, or if he did, we can't find it, which is leaving us all guessing on these things.)

We still don't know the cause of death. The full coroner's report will be finished in about 11 weeks from now. I have no idea why it's that long -- I guess cases where foul play isn't suspected get bumped to the bottom of the queue.

I met his brother Karl, a really sweet guy whom I wish I had met when Eric was alive. I'm hoping to stay in touch with him and get to know him better -- he's the kind of person I could see myself being good friends with, just based on the day we spent together at Eric's house trying to take stock of the situation.

Eric's orange trees are full of fruit. I held it together most of that day, until the late afternoon when I went out front for a break and stood under the trees and remembered all the times Eric and Meredith and I stood in that very spot, picking oranges and talking about whatever random topic was on our minds at the time.

The shock of it all has started to wear off, but the grief is still there. I'm breaking down crying every few days, rather than every few hours, which is good since as of today I'm back at work. Similarly, Meredith, who is hardly ever even sad, let alone depressed, has been hit really hard by this. I've been quite worried about her, though this last week she seemed to be coming back to life a bit. I had hoped that she'd join me on my return home to Leuven, but unfortunately she couldn't because of work. I'm amazed at how well Ruchira is holding together, and really grateful to her for arranging the cremation, and for everything else she's done, both for Eric, and for Meredith.

The memorial service is not planned or scheduled yet. I'm actually pretty upset about this -- I'm not sure why it is taking the people who were ostensibly going to plan it so long to do so. Given that there was no funeral, and the cremation was a separate event, I'd think this would be simpler than normal funerals with receptions, but... well. It's not my intention to criticize anyone. This is all really hard for all of us. I guess I'm just sad that I won't be able to attend (unless, of course, it takes another month or so to actually plan it...), and I'm a bit ashamed that Eric's been dead almost six weeks and there's not been a service. But the argument can be made that the people planning this should take their time and do it right, I suppose -- it's just hard on a lot of us who want to have this time to bring closure to our grief and celebrate his life. Easy to be impatient, I guess.

So, no, I'm not trying to be critical -- the actual point of this post is to let those of you watching this blog for info on the memorial service know that you haven't missed it -- I just don't know what to tell you. When I do, I'll let you know.

In the mean time, I'm thinking it would be nice to set up an online memorial page where people can leave their memories of Eric. Anyone interested in hosting such a thing?

2 comments Tags: family, google, memorial, orange trees, est, e7, tock, eric tiedemann …

In memoriam: Eric S. Tiedemann, 1966-2008

My dear friend, Eric Tiedemann, or "est" as he was known to many, passed away recently. 

My wife, Meredith, found his body this past Sunday, after going down to Mountain View to check in on him. We had been worried about him, since it had been over a week since we or any of his other friends had heard from him, and sadly our worst fears proved true.

This is undoubtedly the hardest thing I've had to write, and it can't possibly do justice to the wonderful person that he was. I've decided to post this information so that his friends who haven't been contacted yet, might learn of this. A memorial is being planned, though there are no firm dates yet. I will let people know when I know more.

I'm trying to post about my feelings toward Eric, and my heart is climbing into my throat. I loved him; he was family to me. I'm not sure how to express that. Everything I say feels wrong, and I'm still not fully accepting of the fact that I can't ask him for his opinion on what I should say.

Maybe in a few days I can write more. In the mean time, feel free to email me at osogato.com (username len) if you'd like to know more, and please point friends of his who may not have heard at this or Meredith's blog. We'll update as appropriate.
21 comments Tags: google, sad, est, e7, eeeeeee, eric tiedemann, codecon, osogato …

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