Shadowlessness

I wrote a post a while back and said that my cellphone is the most annoying item I have in my life. Obviously, there was a “currently” implicit in that statement. I don’t anyone can disagree that the most annoying (and loathed) item ever to exist on this planet is the Microsoft Office assistant paperclip. (The reasons of why I’m even using Office in the first place are too sad and depressing to enumerate.)
I saw an amusing cartoon (warning: animated GIF - may cause partial blindness!) the other day which brought back the horrifying memories of the 5-10 seconds it took to disable the devilish creature and make it disappear the first time I opened Word. * shudders *

Everything was ready. The ordinary razor blade was broken in two to provide better grip and control, the tissue papers to dry the blood that would be running shortly, the ash tray to gather the excess blood and soaked tissues, the lit candle for the hot wax that he would use later to fill the holes and stop the bleeding. It was another night and another nightly ritual.
Removing the nail on the big toe is not easy. He had done this many many times over the past 13 years, and his technique had improved substantially from just trying to yank and break off some part of the toe nail to methodically dissecting and twisting it out piece by piece.
Tonight was the projected night for him to remove the remaining bottom half of the nail. He would start by making a vertical incision in the nail with the razor blade. Before razor blades, he had tried several different knives, and while saw knives (knives with jagged edges) worked acceptably, none were comparable to the ease that razor blades sliced nails, like a hot knife through butter. He started with the vertical cut, right down the middle of the toe nail to cut it into two side-by-side pieces. He knew from experience exactly how thick the toenail was, yet he had to be very careful with the depth of the cut. If he made it too shallow, his nail would not be cut in two and it wouldn’t be easy to remove completely. And if he made it too deep, he would cut into the sensitive flesh underneath and the bleeding would obscure his view and get into his way and he would have to postpone the “procedure”. But cutting the visible part of the nail was not enough. Anybody who’s ever worked with nails knows that they run long beneath the flesh at the base of the nail. He knew that he had to cut two to three millimeters of the skin and flesh covering the hidden part of the nail to be able to slice that part. The fact that the base of the nail was softer and less brittle did help, but it also meant that the nail would be attached and interleaved with flesh and harder to remove completely. He needed to cut some flesh as well, although not nearly as much as one pound, but here he was allowed the extraction of blood, vein and sinew along with the flesh.
Although he was experienced, he couldn’t help but nick the toe while doing the vertical cut anyway. He did not care about the blood and he didn’t feel the throbbing pain after so many years and so many rituals, but the blood did get in his way. He dried up the blood with the tissues and went right back to work. He needed to remove the whole nail this time. If he didn’t make the cut all the way down to the stem of the nail, some part of it would remain in the depths of the toe and would grow into the skin and flesh and would fester there. He didn’t care about the festering, but he would be annoyed because he would not have access to the nail for a long time which pissed him off.
After several minutes, he managed to make the vertical incision all the way through to the base and soft part of the nail. He then started carefully lifting the two parts of the nail up and out, like opening a hatch in the ground. From this point on, there was no avoiding the blood-flow. Bits of tissue (the kind that is part of your body) would be stuck too hard to the underneath of the nail and would be ripped off as it came up. He did it fast, using a pincer to grab the now slippery nail and take it out. If you try something like that, don’t pull the nail up (along the Y axis of your body, towards your head. Do it along the X axis (to your right or left.) It requires more force, but the result is a cleaner severance. He did it first with the right section and then the left. The procedure took six or seven minutes from start to finish.
He did not wipe off the blood that was bubbling now. He lay back and extended his feet and let the blood stream down his foot, down from the corner of where his nail used to be. The bleeding tow looked like an empty eye socket, in half a face, weeping blood.

All I’m going to say is pretty much the same as in here. If you don’t want to read my rants, at least take a look at the linked HOW-TO (chances are that you’ve read that already.)
And I just have to write the rest in Farsi.

First, read this (in Farsi,) if you already don’t know about this “Social Security Plan.”
I wonder when they are going to realize that what people wear is not really our problem. It’s not even their problem. By them, I mean those who are worried about their precious religion and lament the decline of “religiosity” among the youth. Even if those worries and lamentation are not really for their religion, but for their power and control (which is quite justified in their mind. It’s “for the greater good” after all.)
In short term, these tactics are somewhat effective. They do generate resentment, but these resentments are directed at wrong things (”Why they don’t let me wear what I want” instead of “why they don’t let me think what I want.”) And also it provides much opportunity for doing favors to the people and getting rid of the puppets and appearing as saviors. Who will remember that they were the ones who created the problem in the first place?
But in longer term, these kinds of pressure will add up and may lead to what no one wants: another revolution. Who wants another bloody mess that will destroy most of the government infrastructure and would halt or reverse any progress for years?
The only reason I can find is stupidity mixed with fear. Blind, all-consuming, world-class, shear stupidity of someone who is afraid and is panicking.

This morning, two important events were waiting for me when I got online:

• Google.com were filtered out by some utterly stupid people (I’m running after those guys to take back the IDIOT award to give it to these guys!) but it was restored in less than 12 hours AFAIK.
• Robert Jordan just died! What happens to the Wheel now? :-((

After the last presidential election over here, I thought I knew who the most stupid person in the world was, or alternately, the most stupid people.
Three days ago, I was proved wrong! I travel a lot (only between Mashhad and Tehran) and some of these trips are by bus. The bus tickets are sold online as well as in traditional ways. Let me add here that the online bus ticket selling system is brain-dead, but not quite as much as the train and airplane systems!
Anyways, as you might guess, I buy almost all of my tickets online, and this last time was no exception. Only this time I bought them from a bus company that I had not heard about before.
The online system works like this: you go to http://ssit.ir/ and sign in (WARNING: Internet Exploiter-only website!) and choose your city of origin, the bus company, the destination, date, bus, seat, etc. and make the purchase. It gives you a 12-digit reservation number that you present in the bus terminal along with your name, and they print out a ticket for you if the information checks out. It takes about 2 minutes online and 2 minutes at the terminal, and you don’t even have to show an ID or something.
When I went to the terminal in Mashhad about 15 minutes before the departure time, I foresaw no problems. How wrong was I! I went to the counter for my bus line and asked them to give me the print of a ticket I had bought online. The guy said “OK, no problem. Give me your ticket.” I thought he had misunderstood me for some reason. “No, I bought my ticket on the Internet. I want the hard copy now.” (I didn’t say anything about the concept of “hard copy” to him of course. He would have died of brain hemorrhaging right then!) He said “OK, but you have to give me your ticket first.” I said that I don’t know what he’s talking about and he went on to produce a single grease-covered piece of yellow paper that was a printed snapshot of the web-page that contained the reservation number! I was astounded, but I kinda expected this (maybe I’ll tell you later about the time I got on a plane without showing a ticket!) So I began explaining that that piece of paper was completely worthless and anybody could write that up in a matter of minutes. And that I have traveled by online-reserved bus more than a dozen times and all I had to provide to get my ticket was the 12-digit number. He went on and said the most stupid thing he could have said. He said: “But how could we get our money from the company that handles the online sales?” !!!
I did not laugh. I could barely contain my anger as it was. I told them to check their passenger records and see that a ticket with the same number that I was giving them and my name was in there. They called in one of their colleagues and after much conferring and discussion among themselves, they managed to view the list of the passengers for my bus, and guess what, my name was indeed in there. But this did not change anything at all. The morons still insisted that I needed to give them my “ticket”! I even suggested that they print two copies of the ticket they were supposed to give me, but no; they couldn’t do that, because “their computer did not print the tickets,” (which I guess means their “program” didn’t print tickets) which is BS, because I know that their software is the same for all bus corporations. They couldn’t even find the Farsi version of the “Print…” button (maybe the problem was the three dots? After all, three is too many!)
In the end, I went out of the terminal, found an Internet Café and printed the online confirmation page (with the buttons and menus and everything!) and brought it back to them. They took it with such looks of triumph that someone from outside might have thought they had taught me a valuable lesson on the mechanics of the universe. They wrote out a piece of paper for me, and finally I went on to the bus, half and hour late. My seat was changed and the bus still waited for another 15 minutes before finally getting on the way.
Now you understand why these people win the honor of the most stupid people in the world.

Ridiculously infuriating is the act of blocking the English Wikipedia by Iranian judicial system and my ISP. How can someone with a half brain decide to block a community-written wiki encyclopedia?
You don’t know how much I want to meet the guy who made this decision, to stare at him in such a “عاقل اندر سفيه” (”wise man looking at a fool”) manner that he would wish he was never born! Or probably, being the moron he is, he would just not notice.

This is on the same line as restricting all private (households, etc.) Internet connections to 128Kib/s.
Why are they doing this to us and to themselves?

Some time ago, a little less than a year, I came across “The Da Vinci Code” (the book.) It made a bold statement in the preface that all the details about places, people, rituals, etc. have been thoroughly researched and their descriptions are exactly correct.
It seemed to me that Dan Brown must have been an idiot to assert such a thing with such a boldness if he had not in fact done so.
Anyways, I read the book and I liked it. The plot was good and the story engaging (although cliche-ridden) and the details were indeed abundant and informative.
Then, I read “Angels and Demons“. Again the assertions were there, and again the book featured interesting attention to details, fascinating people and places, and a lot of historical claims that were supposed to be facts (maybe they were.) But this time around, one of the characters were supposedly one of the Hashshashin (followers of Hassan Sabbah.)
This time it seemed that the authors research had given him wrong data. It seemed that I knew more about them than Dan Brown. But I didn’t think much of it. After all, I’m no historian, or even a history enthusiast. I let it pass.
A few weeks ago, I came across audio book of “Digital Fortress“, again by Dan Brown. This novel was about cryptography. This time, what he said about it was pure nonsense. I mean, it was obvious that he had read some articles about the subject, maybe even talked to some people who knew some people whose neighbors were cryptographers, but he himself does not understand the first thing not only about cryptography, also theory of informatics and computers in general. I’m not talking about advanced stuff here. What he does not understand starts from the meaning of bits and bytes and spans through meaning of powers and numbers.
For example, at one point, the main characters are looking for a 64-bit key to a specific cipher, that someone has supposedly written down somewhere. During their search, it becomes apparent that the author thinks a 64-bit key is composed of 64 characters! And he doesn’t mean 64 characters of ‘0′ or ‘1′; No. He writes about how the string would be composed of English letters, digits and other characters! Even a 64-bit hex string would be only 16 characters long.
As another example, he talks about a code-breaking machine that has 3 million processors and can brute-force a 64-bit key space in a matter of minutes (less than 15 minutes.) Even though these numbers mean that each processor must be able to cipher at least 3.4 billion blocks per second (note that I’m not talking about 3.4 giga CPU cycles, not even cipher cycles, but full cipher - key setup, everything) for the sake of argument we consider this machine practical. Now, as the story progresses, we see that the NSA (owner of this machine) is not at all worried that they’ll see a code that this machine cannot break by brute force!
I think Dan Brown didn’t even bother to discuss this matter with a Computer Science sophomore, or a talented highschool student for that matter. Because anyone of those would have told him that just increasing the length of the key to 80 bits would make this machine take close to 2 years to decode even a single ciphertext. I don’t even want to estimate what a 128-bit key would do to his super computer!
Even more ridiculous (albeit less obvious) than that, is the fact that his machine does not seem to care about the algorithm! One of the cryptographers in the book thinks to herself that the algorithm did not matter to TRANSLTR (the said machine) since it searched the whole keyspace! I mean, seriously, how stupidly ridiculous is that?
Now after all that, I must say that the book is a good thriller, with all the turns and twists of one and a bit more, but the details? I myslef would never take anything in his books for granted again!