Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

One problem with using Google Meet to have videocalls with friends and family is that I keep forgetting to swap to my meatspace name account, so they keep asking "who is ___" when they look at the account name. Which, whoops. I mean, I'm less concerned about keeping them away from my internet name than I am about keeping internet folk away from my meatspace information, but still, it's at least a momentary awkwardness.

 

Due to a widespread misunderstanding of how languages work, ESPN suddenly picks up a large spike in queer viewership.

 

I think I have a thing about names. I mean, I'm a mathematician; naming things is like half the job sometimes. I find it kind of funny, since I really dislike the idea of labels as applied to people, but names, names are great. Possibly because they serve a distinct enough purpose that they don't claim to imply information that they think isn't there.

Anyway, the original point of this post before I got sidetracked by the fact that I make a lot of posts about names, is that I was thinking about the relationship between Formal Name and Public Key. Not Private Key, and not True Name, but rather the thing that you give out to people.

So my first thought is that if there are multiple cryptographic systems in use, then having a single public key is probably not viable, since the systems might require different formats and sizes for the public key. You can get away with having a single private key by having a string that you hash into the right format for a private key, but you can't usually derive a public key that way, or at least not all of it, while still maintaining control of the private key. After all, deriving a private key from a public key is supposed to be hard, while deriving a public key from a private key is supposed to be easy.
So it can't be the case that your formal name is just your public key run through a deterministic function, at least unless you're willing to have a distinct formal name for each system in use. But it would be good to have some connection between your formal name and your key pair(s), because the cases where your formal name is being used are definitely cases where attesting to your identity is important.
On the other hand, there are cases where you would want a public key that isn't necessarily linked to a Formal Name, or indeed any name at all, in cases where identity attestation is less important or even a negative.

Okay, new thought: the Formal Name isn't a public key. It's a routing address. All the names that are given out are routing addresses. Except not like IP addresses, since those are a mess of local addressing protocols and relative paths. You give out a routing address and people send you messages at that address, and you have multiple routing addresses that determine whether each message gets a priority flag or is automatically deleted from your inbox. There would have to be some distinct system for linking public keys with routing addresses, but that does prevent the mapping issue.

Except that still doesn't quite feel right. I do strongly feel like the formal name should include the public keys, because that's how you introduce yourself in formal situations. Not just "this is how to contact me", but also "this is how to contact me securely" and "this is what my signature looks like".
Like, consider a website. What is the Formal Name of a website? There's the address, but that's subject to change. There's the CName in the DNS tables, which is closer. And then there's the certificate chain that https uses to ensure that the website that gets loaded is actually the website you requested. And I think I want the Formal Name to be something like a combination of the CName, the routing address, and the certificate chain.

So okay, suppose I'm Alice. Or more precisely, suppose I'm

{
{Informal-Friends: Aly (Addr: 127.0.0.1) }
{Informal-Family: Alice (Addr: 192.168.0.1) }
{Informal-When Mom Is Angry: Allison Sybil Grace (Addr: /dev/null) }
{Formal: Dr. Allison Sybil Grace (Addr: 169.254.0.1) (Encryption key: 0xabcdefabcdefabcdef) (Verification key: 0x01234567890123456789) (MAC of previous data: 0x....) }
{True: [REDACTED] (Decryption key: [REDACTED]) (Signing key: [REDACTED]) }
}

Except that Informal-Friends probably also has an encryption key attached, and maybe Informal-Family as well, in which case the True Name would include the decryption keys for those as well.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, what I have for the Formal Name is the Formal Introduction Package, not the Formal Reference Label. I think that's what I'm getting stuck on. Given the Formal Reference Label, you want to be able to access the routing address and the Encryption and Verification keys, but you don't necessarily want to have to pass them every time you use the Formal Reference Label; they might be off in a separate table for which you could use the Formal Reference Label as a lookup key for.
If we are going that route, though, then the Formal Reference Label might as well just be a hash of the Formal Introduction Package, whereby "hash" I really mean any collision-resistant function that has a small enough output that it's worth hashing and running a lookup table rather than passing the entire Formal Introduction Package.

Depending on bandwidth and storage constraints it might be easier to pass the entire Formal Introduction Package at the beginning of the interaction; a local lookup-table might want to be flushed after each interaction to save storage, while a global lookup table would be very large and would have to have a lot of bandwidth for access.

Another consideration is that regardless of what gets passed, any interaction would probably use locally-scoped pronoun-variables rather than pre-determined Names to refer to people.


Okay, so context for all of this; in that sci-fi story I'm never getting around to writing because I spend all my time worldbuilding in my head, one of the characters works in a Temple making new Citizens for her planet. Each baby gets plugged into a local network, and during their time in the Temple they learn how to become functioning Citizens in a globally networked society where essentially all interactions are online. Their routing address is assigned, but part of the requirements for being allowed out into the global network is that they have to pick a name and to come up with a preliminary set of private and public keys. Once they have a name and adequate security, they can join society at large. At some point, the character gives her full Formal Name as a reference model for the pre-Citizens she is instructing and I want a sense of what it looks like.
Part of the reason I'm dithering about the size of the Formal Name is that the Formal Name is really only used by the underlying administrative level of the network, and while we want the administrative overhead of any network to be small, that level is also unbothered by how much space a name takes up except in the sense of being more efficient.

 

But does the happy ending justify the happy means?

 

I should get one of those mugs with an obnoxious saying about how much the drinker loves coffee or something and just always leave a teabag in it.

 

Having realized that by looking up the motivation for the original definition of a vertex operator algebra I might finally understand them a little better. And yeah, it turns out that given what they're supposed to be modeling, the definition makes sense, even if it still looks as if the original formulator was trying too hard to smush the words "homotopy" and "polynomial" together.

 

In another example of "listening to mashups has ruined my ability to recall lyrics accurately", I haven't heard the original Wild Wild West in years, but NeilC's Wow Wow comes up on shuffle fairly often, so listening to the original lyrics is super confusing even though they both make more actual sense and rhyme better.

 

It's funny that despite the insistence on using US Customary Units (derived from but not quite identical to the British Imperial Units) for everything, we still measure lightbulb power usage in watts.

 

People complaining about modern pop music in terms of mashup-ability always hinge their arguments on chord progressions; I've never seen a single person mentioning the ubiquitous verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure, or the fact that even the lengths of the pieces of said structure vary extremely little. I'm pretty sure that it's because the people who complain about the mashup-ability of modern pop music tend to be philistines without a single drop of musical intelligence who are too steeped in racist Dead White Man "music" "theory" to notice a rhythm even if it were hitting them in the face twice a second, but it's almost interesting that I've never seen a structural argument presented.
It would be interesting if I thought there was a good reason for this omission, but as far as I can tell it's mostly hypocrisy and a lack of self-awareness.

 

Where half the thread is people talking about the fake marriage trope and the other half is just people posting the word "bread"

 

The other other other problem with me ever becoming tumblr famous is that my url doesn't cause psychic damage when read.

 

Yesterday my dad told me that one of my friends from back in high-school has come out as trans and that this was the first person he personally knew that he knew was trans. I'm a little surprised that he's never found out about someone he knew coming out as trans before this, but I guess I have a somewhat skewed idea about how liberal the city I grew up in is. Or maybe my dad is just oblivious to this kind of thing.
For those playing along at home, I'm not going to tell him that I'm not cis for a variety of reasons, mostly boiling down to not caring enough.

 

Upon learning that one cannot be compelled against one's spouse, my immediate thought is "can this be applied to the Prisoner's Dilemma?"

Note: you can always voluntarily testify against your spouse, so it's not an automatic application; you need to craft the actual reward/punishment system in the dilemma so that defection would have to be compelled.

 

Standing on the shore and feeling small because you can't see the far side of the water versus standing on the shore and feeling small because you know exactly how far the water extends in comparison to your own stature versus standing on the shore and feeling small because you know that the water never ends.

 

The five stages of griefer

 

This is definitely my favorite dominos video, because each time it looks like it's going to be a delicate dance between the blue and the red dominos, with the energy passing through the scaffolding in a path that carefully intersects and overruns itself, and then right before moving on to the next trick it's just like "by the way, fuck the scaffolding".

 

Anyone have any advice on how to deal with thinking you've found real treasure, only it turns out to be a mimic and is now trying to eat you? Asking for a friend I made along the way.

 

But I'm sure that Sisyphus already knows everything about rock and roll.

 

That's not a pipe. It's a space station!

 

When you decide to take a song and remove every other beat, which beat do you start with?
Listening to a version of Kesha's TiK ToK with every other beat removed, the removed beat was the downbeat. In other words, they removed beats 1 and 3, keeping beats 2 and 4, and while this may sound like a strange decision in the abstract, I think it was the right one.

Usually you care about the downbeat because that's where you anchor the rhythm. Hence you usually start the phrases on that one, and put a lot of the energy there, often in the form of a dramatic kick/bass drum hit. So you might think that removing that reference point would destabilize the track.

But! If you listen to the chorus lyrics of a lot of pop music, you find that the lyrical lines don't start at the downbeat; they usually start a beat or so beforehand and ramp up into it. The downbeat isn't on "tick", it's on "tock", with "tick" on beat 4 of the previous bar to lead smoothly into the next one. So it sounds like you grab the start of each lyrical line. Furthermore, even though the rhymes actually tend to land on either beats 1 or 3 (or both), removing those beats leaves the connecting beats, which are often more interesting rhythmically anyway. Plus, in the prechorus the rhyming word of each line, ostensibly landing on beat 3, is actually repeated onto beat 4, so removing beat 3 doesn't remove the rhyme.

Also, due to the way that the percussion is set up, beats 2 and 4 also have the kick drum going, plus they have the snare, so they're actually louder than beat 1. This is not uncommon in the least, but it does mean that if you remove beats 1 and 3, you end up with a drumline that's on average louder than the original, but is still a kick on every beat. This isn't necessarily the case if you had removed every second beat from, say, a breakbeat track, where the snares are not on top of the kicks but rather between the kicks, and so removing beats 1 and 3 removes the reference kick and leaves you with just the snares.

So I think removing beats 1 and 3 was a good decision. It's not going to be the right decision for every track, but given how TiK ToK is built, it works here.