I might catch flak for this rant, but I feel that it is necessary. I heard Bill O'Reilly talking for a few minutes during the vacation and he was talking to a woman who was trying to get hotels to discontinue selling pay-per-view pornography. Her cause obviously had problems. The first was that the porn makes money for hotels. It would be like selling a cash cow for beans (the non-magical type, I might add). The second is that the porn is completely optionally chosen by the viewer. It's not hurting anyone who isn't asking for it and paying for it. However, it's not a big issue with me right now. We have a war imminent, constitution being violated by two mega-fascist laws, and hackers being persecuted by the FBI unjustly. I'm not going to spend any more time than I already have on fighting for the right to hotel porn. But Mr. O'Reilly did make this rant possible by mentioning that the woman ought to be fighting the virtual child pornography ruling made by the Supreme Court. WTF is that? Well, by now you know what this picture is, right? It is ultra-softcore virtual child pornography. So what is the definition of pornography? It depends who you ask. Many folk back in the 1800s up to 1950s believed that the show of an ankle is pornography. In Afghanistan, a girl showing an ankle is still (even after the Taliban were ousted by the US military invasion) sometimes considered grounds for stoning. So I probably shouldn't show this in Afghanistan, but there are two worse crimes here according to what I know of Muslim religion: using the internet (the tool of evil) and making a sculpture of a person (idoltry). But enough with the bs, this is not pornography enough to produce a case that would get me put in jail here in the US. But it makes a point which I will be explaining in this essay: exactly what is pornography and what is bad about it?
The PNG version of this is absolutely huge. 1700 pixels or so. If it crashes your computer, send me the bill. Wait, don't. Send the bill to the maker of the software that didn't allow for large pictures (likely Microsoft if it's IE or KDE if it's KPaint or Konqueror). They'll probably send it back to you saying that you agreed in the EULA that the damage resulting in using their product is to be paid by you. A malicious hacker who wants to crash someone's computer quickly can simply make a huge blank image compressed with PNG and social engineer it to you. Since most programs allocate the uncompressed amount of data, you'll lose all your physical memory and a lot of your swap. If you don't have a Gig of swap, lots of physical memory, and a fast computer, you're a gonner. Why do programmers give the malicious ones all the power and denies it to the benevolent hacker? Because the benevolent hacker exploits the computer to everyone's mutual benefit (a tough task) while the malevolent hacker uses his/her knowledge to benefit only him/herself at the cost of others (an easy task). That, my hacker-in-training friends, is your lesson for tonight. Use your knowledge for the benefit of everyone or keep it inside your walls. I am living proof: people that come here will see my hacking and benefit. If they do not benefit, they will not come here.
Tonight, I spent a little time on a logo. I'm always trying to make JF look better and this is an attempt. Using Kontour, KDE 3.0's Open Source/Free Software vector graphics program, I made these two drawings. Then I used GIMP to dress them up by using simple blur/sharpen filters. It worked pretty well. The one in the lower right is just a fun one that probably will not get further than a modest mention in this Making Of as the lesson of the day. Today's lesson is beauty. Many say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It depends who you ask. Usually I'm more a fan of that beauty is that which is _good_. However, we physicists have a very objective definition of beauty: lack of entropy and symmetry. Not just in our thermodynamics and electromagnetism do we look for low-entropy systems and symmetry. To find people of the opposite gender, we look for these two attributes. Let's define them. Entropy basically is the order of a system. Something chaotic is high entropy. How do we define order? By probability and usable energy. Noise is high entropy because it is highly disordered. If your TV screen is filled with a bunch of perfect diagonal lines through it, check the wires because it is not likely to be normal noise/entropy, but rather a simple loose connection to cause such a low entropy error. And then there is probability. The probability that you get four aces in poker is low, so getting four aces is a low entropy state: someone is likely fixing the deck. But getting a four, five, ten, jack, and queen is more likely than four aces since there are four fours, four fives, four tens, four jacks, and four queens while there are only four aces. Then we have symmetry. This is more often applied to beauty because a lot of living thing are symmetric, humans for one. There's azimuthal symmetry (EM students love that), radial symmetry, mirror symmetry, and a few others. Anything crooked is automatically less beautiful because it is not symmetric. Buck teeth and freckles can be a positive attribute if they are symmetric.
