From: Dutra de Lacerda <dulac@ip.pt>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 12:05:21 -0700 (PDT)
To: Xcott Craver <caj@math.niu.edu>
Subject: Re: McCarthy return under new clothes
In-Reply-To: <19980827064602846@nomvs.lsumc.edu>
Message-ID: <199808271904.UAA01733@mail2.ip.pt>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At Thursday, you wrote:
> Are you sure there was nothing that could be construed as pornographic
> on your PC?  Nothing in the cache?  Nothing deleted but not overwritten?
> Nothing hiding in the unused space as the end of a sector?  Have you
> never accessed a page only to find it contains pornography (or an ad for
> the same)?

I feel the puzzling question will be: 
	Is the information one's carry in one's head much different
	from the info on a disk?!? It is certainly smaller, but much
	more powerful. 
Besides: This question reflects the absurdity of the actual search 
	for 'virtual crimes'... and will these 'virtual crimes' have
	'virtual punishments'? To this last question the answer is NO.
	The schizoid trend is to treat virtuality as real thing.

	
>	And how about random noise?  Random strings could be ciphertext.
>	If I design PRNGs, and have my laptop drive stuffed with huge
>	random files for DIEHARD analysis, would that one day be 
>	illegal to carry across a border?

No one knows were social insanity, as this, will lead us.
It's starting to have some similarities with the 'Witches Hunt'
in the Middle Ages though. The volume of people using technology
without its understanding of it implications is greater then ever.
Specially in the political population. I subscribe the analysis 
that human kind is NOT rational but 'guts' orientated. 
What the result will be in the long term is uncertain.

I guess all attempts to drive this kind of new beast will fail in
the long run. People needed 2000 years to build a civilization.
The last 50 years are destroying all the cultural links to this
past. What will happen may, most probably, be the disruption of
society as we know it... And all started with the economics 
becoming the #1 motor of societies instead of subordinated to
'quality of life'. 


> From an information-theoretic perspective, we have the asymptotic
> equipartition property telling us that almost all strings are almost 
> equally extremely suspicious.  Will a dartboard w/ the alphabet on it
> be vanishingly unlikely to generate a message one could legally
> carry outside the US?

Again the Brain/Disk paradox. Perhaps a brain has no political useful
information... That would be a change in past events i don't believe.

There's a significant pattern in this strange behavior:
	Absence of sense and contradictory aspects.
These are dangerous generators of errors in ones comprehension.
So its easy to predict a lot of confusion in the future. Specially 
to future generations that did not lived past values. 

Time will tell.

DuLac.

P.S. - I do not subscribe the notion that 'ideas' drive the world.
	A reason for this is that we humans make a complex body of
	iterations and are emotional creatures. Not rational ones.
       This moves the center of the problem to 'culture', as ones
	terrain of conduct, and to personality of leaders, as they 
	are the 'usual conduct' main changers. 

	Hitler would, today and again, get himself elected but this 
 	time with a greatly modified strategy:  He would be kissing 
	children and talking about Peace, the New Words people like 
	to hear.  This leads to the question:  How many new Hitlers 
	have we elected in the last years?   And how to distinguish 
	them from honest citizens? TIP: Honest citizens rarely have 
	the ability to use dirty tricks and get themselves elected.
	
<End-Of-Msg>

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Antonio Manuel Melo de Carvalho Dutra de Lacerda
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