Orwell, 1984

“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an airplane they had to make four.”

Movies to Watch

It happens to me frequently that I get interested in a movie based on some comments or previews, but then I forget to watch it when it finally releases! Well, after discovering a couple of interesting movies today I will try to not to lose track of them.

First, Saluda al Diablo de mi parte is a Colombian movie by the same director of Al Final Del Espectro:




The second movie is the latest work of Mamoru Oshii, and it seems to be out (at least in Japan)



This reminds me that I also need to keep track of the new movies of Evangelion

P.S.
Did that woman just said "Kusanagi Suito desu"? She does look like Motoko!!

Turning Political

I recently found an interesting video:



I think this video describes in an insightful way the differences between the two parties. I think we need to place ourselves in other people's shoes, their frame of mind and stop being so self-righteous.

However, by this same definition, it is liberals who tend to be less self-righteous than conservatives; and nothing could exemplify this issue better than the response of Obama and McCain on the question of Evil:






It was refreshing to hear about other "evils" in the world that are going unnoticed because of this single-minded focus on Islamic terrorists, as if the only evil in the world was Bin Laden.

But the most important fact was that the response of Obama included the fact that we must confront evil with humility, because some of the worst attrocities in the world were committed under the claim of fighting evil.

Although I wasn't originally a fan of Obama, I have become in time a supporter. His response demonstrates the open-mindedness and intelligence that the US needs from a leader. I recently saw Bill Maher questioning why republicans were accusing Obama of being Cosmopolitan? He argued that this accusation was ridicoulous: that the fathers of US were some of the most cosmopolitan and intellectual people in the planet, and he doesn't understand how in recent years being smart, cosmopolitan, and intellectual could be seen as something negative.

The Apollo program, affirmative action, the International Space Station... all these programs flourished thanks to presidents who had a minimum level of curiousity and who wanted a fair society. People who wanted to push some of the boundaries of what the human race could achieve.

Update: I found the ending of an article by Sam Harris in Newsweek very relevant to my post:

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

---

PS. I couldn't find the youtube posts of some of the videos in this post because I Leechblocked myself, so I had to post the links pointing to godtube.

PS.2 if you want to know what happened to my linux command post, you can find it here.

PS3 Time to play! Long live MGS4

PS4 "I play God games Old Testamet style" -Yahtzee ==> "Long live Rome: Total War" --Alvaro.

Navigator RIP

I have been a user of Netscape Navigator for more than a decade. While I have used Firefox or Safari once in a while, I always came back to Netscape because of the nostalgia. Lately, however, my Netscape browser keeps reminding me that I need to change to Firefox or Flock because there are not going to be any more security updates for Navigator. More precisely, AOL is ending development and support for Netscape Navigator.

What am I supposed to do now?

To the lighthouse

To the lighthouse is another of the modernist novels where the plot is not important... however, while reading Wikipedia, trying to figure out why this novel was so famous, I found out an interesting point.

"In order to be able to understand thought, [Virginia] Woolf's diaries reveal, the author would spend considerable time listening to herself think, observing how and which words and emotions arose in her own mind in response to what she saw".


How interesting is that! I have always wondered... how can you think without a language? How do dogs or whales think?

Of Gods and Wars

(Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. Atropos [the Fates]).

How many of you were disappointed when the Titans lost to the Gods in the great war of ancient Greek mythology? Well, I was one of the disappointed, and ever since I was 6 years old, I have been wishing things had been different!

(William Blake. Hecate or the Three Fates).

Well, apparently now, things can be different thanks to God of War 2! "God of War" is a reinterpretation of Greek myths for our times, and I think it is largely based on the movie Clash of the Titans (true, the movie might not be the best, but as a kid, I had no other Greek mythology movie to compare against, and thus, it became the standard). Both, God of War, and Clash of the Titans, have Perseus (and the same actor is in both!!) Medusa, Pegasus, the Fates, and yes, both even have a Kraken (and a suspiciously humanoid Kraken for all that matters).

(Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars --i.e. Aphrodite and Ares)

One can argue that there are some inaccuracies (how can Gaia help someone who keeps killing Cyclopes? and the Kraken is not a Greek myth!), it is important to remember that in Greek mythology, there were always several versions of the stories, and in that sense "God of War" actually follows the essence of Greek myths very faithfully!

(Sir Anthony van Dyck: Jupiter--i.e.,Zeus-- and Antiope)

For example, it is known that Zeus was not a fateful husband, in fact he had many offspring, by either tricking and seducing several women, or even, by raping them. Several of his sons (such as Heracles, or Perseus) turned out to be famous heroes. Now Kratos, the main character in God of War, appears to be the average Greek hero and tragic figure (although a bit more vengeful than the average hero). The Gods play with his destiny as most Gods play with humans in Greek mythology. However, I never saw coming the obvious: the father of Kratos is Zeus! This is just one of the big surprises of the storyline, and it makes perfect sense according to Greek myths.


(Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Saturn --i.e., Cronus-- Devouring One of his Children)


The other fact that makes perfect sense, according to the Greek myths, is that the son (Kratos) is going to try and depose his father (Zeus), in the fashion that has plagued Greek mythology from the beginning: Uranus was deposed by his son Cronus, and Cronus was deposed by his son Zeus. Now I am sure I read somewhere about a story of a prophesy that one of the sons of Zeus was going to depose him (when I read that prophesy I felt cheated, the Greeks myths never continued, and this prophesy never came to happen!). But now, this is the thing that has me really excited about God of War 3: the fact that finally the Titans are going to get the chance of fighting back against the Gods, and that I am going to see a detailed recreation of each God (hopefully) and Titan. Hopefully in the sequel, the Gods will appear much more often, and we get to see all of them in action :-).

(Joachim Wtewael. The Battle Between the Gods and the Titans.)

The mentality of researchers in security

Neil Koblitz published an interesting article on his views about the field of cryptography; in particular, of the differences he sees between the fields of provable security and mathematics. In it he argues that the word "provable" is over-hyped, and it gives a false sense of security. Although this might be true, the problem is that we need an intuitive way to separate formal approaches to security (provable security) from approaches based on heuristic security arguments. Of course, several cryptographers such as the ones named in Koblitz paper (Oded Goldreich, and Hugo Krawczyk) and others (Jonathan Katz, Luca Trevisan) have made rebuttals to this article.

The tone of Koblitz and the rebuttals by several cryptographers just prove the last sentences of his paper: "The 'spy vs. spy' mentality of constant competition and rivalry extends to the disciplinary culture of the field. This can be excessive --and childish at times-- but it also explains in part why it can be so much fun to do research in cryptography."

This is the main reason I wanted to make this post. I have been recently discussing with several other people (even before I read this article) that the field of computer security had in general, a very competitive attitude. As someone who has been in security, machine learning, communications, and signal processing conferences, I have the impression that people attending security conferences are in general more aggressive than others. I think the attitude you find is of people trying to find gaps in other people's arguments to "break" schemes. This "in your face" attitude of breaking other people's work is not so noticeable in other fields. I have to admit though, that this attitude always keeps you on the edge, and you have to become a perfectionist in your results. This competitiveness is why "it can be so much fun to do research in cryptography" and security in general.