Ken's blog

[lefoezyy] Some notes on Google Books Ngrams

2012-02-02T01:32:00.004Z

Just looking at the 1-grams (unigrams):
A complete list of case-folded words and their counts (5591668 lines), in descending order.

Recompression
139321248 Dec 14 2010 googlebooks-eng-all-1gram-20090715-1.csv.lzma
181843105 Dec 14 2010 googlebooks-eng-all-1gram-20090715-1.csv.bz2
206135630 Jan 31 18:33 googlebooks-eng-all-1gram-20090715-1.csv.zip
969963702 Dec 14 2010 googlebooks-eng-all-1gram-20090715-1.csv
Sizes in bytes. It compresses better with lzma, than zip or bzip2

Building the word count list with Perl:
perl -nlwe '@F=split /\t/;$c{lc$F[0]}+=$F[2];END{for(keys%c){print "$_\t$c{$_}"}}'

It is curious that the word "the" does not occur in part 0.

[skfhelsw] Kick scooter martial art

2012-02-02T01:28:00.002Z

Create a martial art based on the kick scooter ("Razor scooter") as a weapon. It's a reasonable (and otherwise useful) thing for a person to be always carrying around or riding.

[acichmzd] Blitz strip chess match

2012-02-01T02:27:00.004Z

Strip chess played as a series of blitz games: a match.

Remove one item of clothing for each victory. This is the opposite of most "strip" games, where clothing removal is a punishment for losing. But the rationale is, if you don't want to get naked, you shouldn't be playing a strip game, so, if you do want to get naked, then clothing removal should be the reward for winning.

Must win at least one game after the last article is removed. Offers the possibility of a heroic last stand.

Played standing with the board on a cocktail height table.

For a spectator event, finding chessplayers you want to see naked is left as an exercise for the reader.

[daygvtxu] Thoughts on the Eternity II puzzle

2012-01-31T20:05:00.002Z

Solve Tetravex by simulated annealing. A huge collection of state transition functions:

* Take a rectangular area and rotate it (perhaps 90 degrees if square).
* Take any two rectangular areas of the same shape and rearrange (double rotations, swaps). A double rotation is different from sequential single rotations if the areas touch because it avoids the transition state which might have a poor score.
* Take a rectangular area, cut it into 4 pieces with 2 orthogonal cuts, then rearrange the pieces to fit in the area.
* Inverse of the previous (invertible transitions seem like a good idea).
* 3 pieces with 2 parallel cuts.
* Many functions do not uniquely belong to one category, beware of double counting for uniform sampling.

The general idea is to be able to move large areas at once so that "good" regions of matched tiles don't get broken up.

The obvious scoring (fitness) function is number of matched tiles, and this can be evaluated quickly by only looking at the boundaries of edges that changed by the state transition.

We taking the scoring function a step further in sophistication by eliminating pairs of tiles which seem to be matched but actually quickly lead to impossibility. For every 1x2 matched pair of tiles, do a test solve of a 3x4 region around it to make sure it is possible. Edges make things hairy.

Repeat, but for 2x2 matched blocks.

The number of state transition functions available probably number in the billions or trillions, and late in the simulation, very few may yield positive (or not very negative) change in score. Evaluate all the possible transitions in parallel in hardware (FPGA) and select among the best. (Bluespec)

[kdeylhhu] Schadenfreude magazine

2012-01-31T05:59:00.002Z

Create a mass-market magazine explicitly entitled Schadenfreude. It will bring you joy in reading it, filled with stories of others' misfortunes.

The gossip tabloids are (implicitly) already like this: which big Hollywood couple is divorcing now, and for what gruesome infidelity?

[wtdkhuwj] Freedom and the regulation of money

2012-01-31T05:43:00.003Z

The regulation of money amounts to a reduction of freedom. Is it worth it?

Regulating money, e.g., requiring a paper trail for financial accounts and transactions, allows for those who control the money supply to control those who use money.

The common criminal is thus thwarted, but organized crime with tremendous resources to black markets, money laundering, and trading in commodities other than money are not. Similarly, the poor person or small business is thwarted from doing small illegal things, but the very wealthy individuals and large corporations (e.g., Enron) who can take advantage of loopholes, offshore accounts, are not.

Consider a radical change in philosophy: any financial transaction between two consenting parties remains 100% private, beyond the reach of any subpoena or regulation, even if a third party such as a bank or credit card company is involved. Anyone can create anonymous accounts to move money around, buy things, sell things.

What will happen? The world will change a lot. It does equalize the playing field. Many forms of taxation will become impossible; however, taxation by inflation (the government simply prints the money it needs to spend) is still possible.

It perhaps becomes very difficult to track criminals and investigate crimes or thwart pre-crimes. Is that the price of freedom? Society will probably adapt.

How much power money can buy is probably an issue here. If money can't buy very much power, then deregulating it won't cause much harm.

Inspired by a talk by Undersecretary of Treasury John Taylor about the U.S. freezing terrorists' assets. We hope such power is only used for good, but realistically, it almost certainly isn't.

Also inspired by Bitcoin, which promises such privacy. What if we were to write the law to match Bitcoin?

[etnfseal] Snark cards

2012-01-31T05:28:00.005Z

Create a deck of cards based on one of the snark graphs.

Cards represent nodes (marked with neighbor nodes), or represent edges (marked with endpoint nodes). For edges, a domino-like tile might be more appropriate.

Inspired by the Hoffman-Singleton Game by Ed Pegg, Jr.

[oyackdyz] Aluminum age

2012-01-31T05:28:00.004Z

The level of civilization can be described by the prevalent material: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. What comes next?

The Type Metal Age starting with Gutenberg's printing press, because of course that changed the world. Not too many people recognize Gutenberg's contribution was hugely metallurgical.

The Aluminum Age starting with the Hall process. Before then, aluminum was a precious metal.

Currently Aluminum Age, or perhaps Silicon Age.

What does the future hold? The Room Temperature Superconductor Age?

[gdjerpeg] Measuring "like"

2012-01-30T19:30:00.003Z

Person A likes person B. But this information is of little use to person B, as everyone has a different definition of "like".

More useful would be, what actions can person B do to person A which person A will enjoy, or be willing to forgive? These are actions which are normally forbidden, or would create unhappiness, between two random people. Such actions can be selected from a standardized list.

Measure "like" in currency of actions in the real world.

Future post: the same concept applied to "Do you love me?"

[mdrgxafe] Bubblebabble Sator Square

2012-01-30T06:04:00.003Z

Consider a modification of the Bubble Babble digest algorithm to emit words of 25 letters at a time (13 consonants, 12 vowels) instead of 5 at a time. Then, arrange the letters into 5 by 5 blocks:

T	u	C	a	L
o	T	i	B	e
K	o	T	i	F
o	G	i	M	u
F	u	G	i	H

This way, the 5-letter subwords can be read and verified both across and down as a doublecheck.

Inspired by the sator square in Latin, but omitting the capability of reading the same across and down (or being real words). We keep the checkerboard pattern of consonants and vowels.

With 16 consonants and 5 vowels to choose from, (omitting x and y from original Bubble Babble), one can fit up to log₂(16¹³ * 5¹²) = 79 bits per block.

While the original Bubble Babble tried to do error detection, let's separate concerns and assuming error detection or correction is done at a different level. Similarly, let padding be done elsewhere, too. We assume the message is a multiple of 79 bits.

Let n be a 79 bit integer. Let c = n mod (16^13), i.e lower 52 bits, and v = n div (16^13), i.e., upper 27 bits. Write c in base 16 using the alphabet ( b c d f g h k l m n p r s t v z ), and write v in base 5 using the alphabet ( a e i o u ), then interleave into a square.

One may consider consonant clusters, consonants from other languages (clicks, aspiration), diphthong vowels, vowel tones, but things get messy, especially with consonant clusters. Some consonants can only be in certain places of a word. Here is one attempt, implemented in Haskell. This is well on our way to a random word generator, though it often creates nearly unpronounceable words, probably due to the excessive consonant clusters.

Vowels: a e i o u ai ei oi au á à é è í ì ó ò ú ù ái ài éi èi ói òi áu àu

Consonants: K! T! P! R Y H W ñ Kn Gn Br Dr Fr Gr Kr Pr Tr Vr Bl Fl Kl Pl Sl Vl Ð nD nG nK nT nZ mP rJ rS rZ rČ rŠ rθ nS mB nL rB rD rF rG rK rM rN rP rT rЦ rV rχ J S Z Č Š θ B D F G K L M N P T Ц V χ sT sK sP Ξ Ψ

Number of choices by grid position:

46	27	45	27	24
27	72	27	72	27
45	27	72	27	36
27	72	27	72	27
24	27	36	27	39

This allows 128 bits (129.21072040507875) to be encoded in a single block. Sample:

R	è	M	u	Š
u	Ψ	àu	Ð	é
ñ	ái	Ц	ái	Ξ
ò	θ	oi	nG	ì
χ	ò	rČ	òi	P!

[kjhvfwzf] Patent infringement claims against the state

2012-01-29T21:05:00.003Z

The owner of a History patent that has gone on to commercial success by someone else (History patents offer no exclusive use, so perhaps many others used it) applies for a prize, i.e., compensation for the intellectual contribution to society. The prize committee tries to sort out the amount the History patent contributed toward the ultimate implementation of the product (a devilish detail). This is paid out of taxpayer funds: "all of society benefitted from the final product, so all of society pays." Information is a public good.

These prizes provide incentive for people to file History patents.

Obviously they'll be an uneasy situation of a morally disgusting product that sells extremely well (there are MANY of these, reflecting a different fundamental problem) for which the inventor seeks public compensation, then intense pressure on the committee to be political.

[ioejoaqy] Being John Malkovitch's Tunnel of Love

2012-01-27T05:30:00.002Z

Insert the sex toy into your orifice of choice. Walk or crawl into a person-sized tunnel which is scale model of the toy except much larger. The inside is lined with buttons or sensors. Push any button and it stimulates (mechanically, electrically?) the corresponding point of the inserted toy, communicating via wireless.

[ybjouizd] Believing the TSA's liquid prohibition

2012-01-27T01:43:00.003Z

The TSA has yet to fully raise the prohibition of liquids on planes. Speculate that the reason is because government scientists have secretly discovered how to build and deploy a reliable, destructive, binary-liquid-explosive bomb. This is in contrast to earlier reports of how difficult it is to properly mix highly concentrated peroxide and fuel say in an aircraft lavatory without it prematurely exploding (causing relatively little damage) or catching fire (also causing relatively little damage).

If true, both government scientists and anyone else who has independently succeeded have kept silent (perhaps forced to?). It points to the standard conundrum of open science: even though the result could be used for evil, it also means there is a very non-obvious, highly sought-after scientific result that is being withheld. There are many legitimate chemists and chemical engineers working on things very different from terrorism, like curing cancer, who seek methods of mixing things without them immediately exploding.

However, taking the refusal to lift the ban as positive information (1 bit), can you derive the secret method? Merely knowing it is possible is often tremendously useful.

[abyylzzz] Beaming messages by spotlight

2012-01-27T01:12:00.003Z

Create a means of broadcasting a message via moving spotlights beamed into the night sky (and consequently viewable for miles around).

Morse code is the obvious way, but we're wanting something better, more fluid. Let the spotlights remain continuously lit, and the message encoded in the motion of the beams. It's tricky because the motion will be perceived different depending on the location of the viewer.

A different tack: create a method that is machine readable, namely by pointing your cameraphone at the sky. This will probably simply be a rapidly blinking beam.

Of course, inspired by the Bat signal. The endpoint of a beam may be visible projected onto clouds, or (more vividly) the entire beam reflecting off precipitation or dust.

[abxmbszd] Scandalous dress and amount of fun

2012-01-27T01:06:00.002Z

How much does the sluttiness of your outfit correlate with how much fun you have at a dance? Self-experimentation is encouraged, as it holds constant you the wearer and your measure of "amount of fun", two very significant variables.

Some aspects beyond your control:

The sluttiness of your outfit may be relative to the sluttiness of everyone else's outfit. For example, in warm weather, everyone may choose to reveal a lot of skin.

The sluttiness of your outfit is ultimately judged not by you, but by others who look at you (a measure you might not have access to), so you may be unable to discern correlation if your measure is very different from how others see you.

The amount of fun may have large variance for other reasons, making it difficult to isolate the effect of dress.

[lqwtcytv] Elder Wand of a triangle

2012-01-27T00:41:00.005Z

Let the line from a triangle vertex to the tangent point of the incircle on the opposite edge be named henceforth the Elder Wand (joining the Witch of Agnesi among geometric objects with interesting names).

The three altitudes of a triangle intersect at the orthocenter.
The three medians of a triangle intersect at the centroid.
The three angle bisectors of a triangle intersect at the incenter.
The three perpendicular bisectors of a triangle intersect at the circumcenter.
The three symmedians of a triangle intersect at the symmedian point.
The three Elder Wands of a triangle intersect at the Gergonne point.
The three ___ of a triangle intersect at the Nagel point.

Inspired by

math-fail.com

which is in turn inspired by the Deathly Hallows symbol in Harry Potter.

[rwmhzrir] Cosmo versus anti-Cosmo game theory

2012-01-26T23:41:00.003Z

The traditional narrative goes, the female reads Cosmopolitan magazine, and uses the techniques described therein to be good in bed, to feign enthusiasm and interest in sex, to successfully seduce the male. After the male has "put a ring on it", thus contracted into marriage, she becomes no longer interested in sex: I'm too tired, I have a headache, etc.

If this narrative is true, then there should be strong game-theoretic response. After all, this is the mating game, a matter of much greater than life and death (viz., the life and death of all of your descendants until the end of time!). There should be equally serious "anti-Cosmo" observation, wherein the male tries to discern whether the female is merely feigning interest in sex or is genuinely interested, and will continue to be so after marriage. I see very little information-sharing of such indicators.

There could be many reasons why, ranging from the easiness of divorce or adultery, it's actually impossible to fake the whole experience (despite Sally and Harry).

[ipyfbpen] Money and power

2012-01-26T21:39:00.002Z

Money can buy power (currently implicitly, but I've proposed explicitly in voting and pseudo-bribes).

This causes a great demand for money, and people and corporations willing to do tremendously socially harmful things to acquire more money.

Is this right? Or are the distortions (if any) caused by such a system too great?

But what is the alternative? Should there be a different currency for power separate from that used to buy regular goods and services? I don't see how that could work.

A democracy ought to be power from the people. Is the problem that money can buy people? Then, perhaps we need a better welfare state to preserve democracy.

[zhytkhmb] Not touch move rule

2012-01-26T21:08:00.003Z

Consider a radical alternative to the touch move rule in chess: a move becomes committed only when the clock is pressed.

Before that point, a player may move (and unmove) any and all of his or her pieces. Even more radically, opponent's pieces, too. The only constraint is the position when the clock is pressed must be a legal move from the previous position.

Some sort of penalty for illegal move/position. Should it be the opponent, or a constantly watching arbiter, to catch illegal moves? The latter is possible with computers: advances in technology allow for the game to be played in different, better, ways.

Essentially a player may try playing out the consequences of a potential move on the board while it is his turn, hopefully yielding higher quality play. You don't need to do the calculations in your head. But the opponent can watch, too ("exposing your hand"), so it might be disadvantageous to you.

The spectators benefit by being able to see what the players are thinking.

[eivgrhkz] Already going to war against Iran

2012-01-26T21:07:00.003Z

While it may seem a big decision over whether to go to war with Iran is looming, I worry the decision has already been made by the American people.

How many Americans consider Iranians to be good people?
How many Americans consider the Iranian government to be generally beneficient, looking out for its people?
How many Americans consider Iran's state religion (a conservative branch of Islam) to be worthy of respect and freedom-to-practice according to basic human rights?

American sentiment has already been tremendously turned against Iran. Was it deliberate, or a "natural" chain of events? Was it covertly planned and executed? If so, then by whom? Study how it was done.

I was behind the curve about Iraq.

[dylgczqf] Eliminate mouse drag

2012-01-26T20:42:00.004Z

Eliminate the drag-with-button-down as a mouse UI gesture, because it is awkward to do, and doesn't easily translate to mouse alternative input devices (e.g., touch screens). It also makes ambiguous whether something is a click (with mouse intended to be still but not quite) or drag (with mouse only moving a very small distance).

All UI interaction should be possible with clicks only. Drag operations could be available as a shortcut or alternative to another way of doing it without drag.

Inspired by the difficulty of using a VNC client on Android.

[xcufnrvg] Solar powered digital picture frame

2012-01-26T20:37:00.002Z

Create a digital picture frame that will continuously display a slideshow of pictures. Use solar power (ambient light) only, so it works forever.

E-Ink is probably the way to go, though we perhaps need artwork and pictures suited for its monochromaticity. Halftoning.

The frame rate is limited by available power. No one can see it in the dark, anyway.

Colored E-Ink (by competitors?) might be happening soon, if not already.

[jhnmtgcz] One death, one vote

2012-01-26T02:41:00.004Z

Consider extremely difficult policy decisions being decided by lining up fervent supporters on one side, fervent opponents on the other, then executing all them. The decision goes in the direction of greater numbers.

Do you care about a cause enough to die for it? This attempts to fairly quantify amount of "care", so that a majority, only lukewarm in favor of something, does not defeat a slightly smaller number vehemently extremely against it. Ultimately, it seems, the only way to compare "care" between two people is by life and death (or perhaps dollars?). Everyone is equal: you have but one life you can give to your country.

When your life is on the line, you may be inspired to deeply think about the issue, perhaps to cut through the bullshit. How can we be sure all participants are "competent", having adequate access to arguments on both sides? Perhaps an exam?

(One sleazy issue might be repealing the estate tax. Those near death might not care about being executed. However, those near death without sizeable estates might oppose them.)

Perhaps a slight modification: equal numbers are executed on both sides: the entirety of the losing side and a randomly chosen subset of the winning side. This allows a further sophistication: you may contribute not your full life to the question, but only a portion of it, yielding a smaller "weight" in the lottery for execution. But if your slice is randomly chosen (even if you had contributed a small slice), then your life is up.

We execute both sides instead of just the victors. If it were just the victors, then the surviving losers could bring up the issue over and over, each time seeing fewer opposition. Alternatively, old deaths could continue to count, perhaps with some discounting over time.

However, executing both sides seems an all-pay auction, which is a problem. All the other potential problems of strategic voting also persist.

Inspired by the great many acts of violence by suicide bombers, campus shooters, etc., who feel unhappy at the state of society but frustrated at being unable to make a change to it, even though they are willing to give their lives for it.

[kgrqxduc] Astronomical time widget

2012-01-25T20:41:00.004Z

A widget displays portion of the day, portion of the year as pie charts. Maybe in decimal, too.

Maybe portion of lunar month, though I don't know if there is high precision (1 second resolution) information of when the new moon happens. Perhaps cheat and display blurry phase.

Maybe measure day from dawn, year from vernal equinox. (Counting from winter solstice, halfway from the crossing point, is an interesting analogue of counting from midnight.)

Maybe day of the year, factored.

App idea. This should be an easy exercise.

[cgkooksr] Humans as batteries in The Matrix

2012-01-25T19:49:00.003Z

The machines kept humans around not for power in the wattage sense, but for computational power. There are many "AI" tasks which a human brain can do better than a computer (at least, more energy efficiently), so the machines cultivated humans in server farms to be giant arrays of coprocessors.

Some of the AI tasks that human brains do well include vision, inductive reasoning, creativity, understanding and inspiring other humans. One extremely sinister task is, given that the machines are at war with humans, using humans for opponent modeling to test and simulate battle strategies: the trapped humans were being used against humanity.

Someone else: "The machines use humans, not for energy, but for processing power."

[zpuvhspk] Parsing a tree

2012-01-25T19:33:00.002Z

Given a set of tokens already organized into a tree, parse it into a syntax tree. This is in contrast to a traditional parser which takes in a linear sequence of tokens.

On one hand, this seems an easier task. On the other, one could do "harder" context-sensitive stuff more straightforwardly.

One subroutine will probably be to run a linear parser across siblings, and maybe recursively descend.

Ad hoc ways probably work, but it would be nice to have some theoretical or organized foundation, like the beautiful theory of LL(k), LR, and so forth.

Inspired by Lisp-like sugaring of other computer languages. Currently I flatten it with linear tokens "(" and ")" and use a LALR parser.

[mcpiankr] Law & Order: MIB

2012-01-25T18:49:00.003Z

Yet another spin off of the Law & Order TV series, but following the "typical" investigations of the "Men In Black" division from the movie.

Cannot easily do "ripped from the headlines" as the realistic series do, so maybe not so popular.

[sllktkuu] Chess set for blitz chess

2012-01-25T18:47:00.004Z

Create a chess board and pieces designed for blitz play. The goal is to avoid pieces that get knocked over easily, pieces not getting exactly placed in a square, and so forth, while still keeping it possible to rapidly make moves.

Two proposals:

Every piece gets an upside-down square pyramid glued to its base, and the board is no longer flat but has corresponding holes that the "plugs" fit into. (Optimize the size and depth of the pyramid.)

Pieces are replaced with spherical marbles (easy to grasp) which the piece type drawn on them (probably multiple times). The board is again not flat but each square has an indentation or shallow cup to hold the stone. Lined with something soft so the piece can be dropped into it without bouncing out. Slightly inspired by mancala, with the feeling of dropping a seed into a pit.

They need not be spheres, perhaps other polyhedra, including dice of different shapes and sizes. This could be cheaply constructed with egg cartons.

For either, you can no longer quickly slide a piece from one square to another, you have to pick it up.

[vwxwknpy] Bitcoin base 58

2012-01-25T03:33:00.002Z

Bitcoin uses base 58 to encode addresses: digits, uppercase, lowercase are 62, minus 0 O I l (zero, capital o, capital i, lowercase L).

It could have been more aggressive: 1lI 2Z 5S and the many uppercase and lowercase letter pairs which cannot be distinguished unless you know the scale, e.g., cC oO sS vV wW xX zZ. Imagine if hand written address. fF

[bngffpyz] Late season weighted more

2012-01-22T07:05:00.009Z

Performance of a team late in the season is probably a better indicator of how they will perform in an end of season playoff tournament, ultimately, whether they will win the championship. Let team playoff eligibility reflect this, perhaps using a weighted averaging formula. But what should the weights in the formula be, and on what features?

We propose a feedback approach for calculating playoff eligibility. Playoff spots are filled probabilistically (a lottery) with weights determined by "this year's formula", which attempts to select the teams most likely to win the championship. After the championship is decided, the formula is updated for next year so the features of the team which won have higher probability of being selected on the future.

The probabilistic nature of filling the spots allows for "exploration" of the formula space to prevent it from getting stuck in a local maximum. Occasionally, a low probability team will be selected and go on to win, prompting a significant update to the formula.

(Alternatively, if you want every game of the regular season to count the same, then eliminate all postseason play.)

[ywitdlmr] Garbage time and season point differential

2012-01-21T22:49:00.002Z

Many sports suffer from garbage time at the end of the game in which the outcome is already clear. Relatedly, in soccer, a team in the lead goes purely on the defensive resulting in a boring game.

To preserve a high quality of play through the whole game for the spectators, let teams be ranked not by win-loss, but by season total (or average) point differential.

Baseball might be problematic because it is not played on a clock, so a team needs to decide whether it's worth the wear and tear on players to extend the game and keep scoring more runs.

[vfrhrwlh] No rules basketball

2012-01-21T22:01:00.004Z

What would basketball be like with (almost) no rules? If it goes through the hoop, then it's 2 points. Period. Anything goes.

Perhaps eliminate the dribble, perhaps need pads and helmets like football (there's no rule against tackling the ball carrier, or any other player: a screen). Games like this have probably already happened in "street ball" played informally.

Inspired by the excessive importance of referees on the game.

[folnlnje] Chromebook without SAAS

2012-01-21T21:47:00.002Z

Create the Chromebook experience without its privacy destruction and other losses of freedom caused by software as a service.

Key is unobtrusive, seamless, automatic upgrades. A personal server to store data. Most ideas have been addressed previously on this blog.

[itplszzq] SOPA / PIPA is censorship

2012-01-21T20:25:00.015Z

I am pleased that many others have also identified the SOPA and PIPA bills before Congress to be censorship, because that is how I see it: that is why this issue is so important.

This issue is not about kids downloading music and movies, not about musicians and movie studies losing money or cutting jobs. This is about our right to free speech, one of our most precious freedoms, one of the defining principles of democracy.

As bad as our economy may currently be, there are things more important than jobs. Freedom of speech is one of them.

(Soviet communism, complete with even more censorship and oppression, could give us 0% unemployment. As attractive as that may seem, it comes at exquisite cost of giving up freedom.)

(Weaker copyright law can create jobs, and today's too-strong copyright law has already destroyed jobs at Grokster and Lime.)

When one person wishes to communicate information to another person, any barrier to that communication is censorship. Even if that information is copyrighted by a third party, what is being communicated are the ideas embedded in the copyrighted content. Blocking piracy is blocking the free flow of ideas: it is censorship, explicitly, obviously, and in its worst form.

Certainly a lot of copyright piracy amounts to inane speech, not communicating ideas vital to the proper functioning of our democracy; however, most other speech is inane the same way, but is nonetheless protected.

Others oppose SOPA / PIPA because a lot of legitimate speech may be censored along with blocking access to pirated material. That is a valid argument, but I am taking it further: Pirated material is itself legitimate speech (and law should be changed to reflect this). This is in anticipation of altered versions of SOPA / PIPA being proposed. No version of a bill, however altered, which censors pirated material should be allowed to become law. (Others liken SOPA / PIPA to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I believe neither the baby nor the bathwater should be thrown out.)

After much thought, I feel the best way is to roll back copyright law to a form, and philosophy, that produced tremendous content and creativity for hundreds (if not millions) of years: lift all restrictions to noncommercial copying. Noncommercial copying, that is, one person communicating ideas to another person without trying to make money off of it, is exactly the kind of speech that a democracy should protect.

Yes, such a roll back will cause vast changes in the entertainment industry, but people want to entertain; people want to be entertained. They will continue to find a way! (I have explored a few in this blog: Donation log and references )

(Meta: writing essays like this has gotten a lot easier as I continue to get lots of practice.)

[onyiuljo] Two black holes coalescing

2012-01-21T20:20:00.002Z

Two black holes spin around each other and coalesce into one.

In the absence of any surrounding matter (accretion disks, jets), this is the most boring thing to watch in electromagnetic radiation: black on black.

But if you could see the fabric of spacetime itself (computer simulation), it should be fascinating. Imagine both black holes are rotating, but their axes not parallel. The frame dragging effects probably interfere with each other.

Previous musing

[kkbnnlvn] Black hole in low altitude Earth orbit

2012-01-21T20:12:00.004Z

Construct or capture a low-mass black hole and place it in a low altitude circular Earth orbit: by low, I mean very low: altitude 1 meter, or even zero -- it skims (plows?) along the ground. (Yet another difficult astroengineering project.)

Will it encounter air resistance? Will it encounter resistance passing through mountains of solid dirt or rock (which, like air, is not very dense compared to a black hole)? What will it look like as it zips by a standing observer?

[mlunzrtu] Discovering choreography orbits by gravitational waves

2012-01-21T19:33:00.002Z

The weird solutions to the N-body problem, such as the figure-8 orbit, are expected to be extremely rare. Are they best discovered by a gravitational wave observatory?

[ffkddkal] Greatest chess player

2012-01-21T08:21:00.003Z

Now that the question of the absolute strongest chess player in history has been conclusively (and boringly) settled (it's a computer), we can turn our attention to who was the greatest chess player: who had the most impact on the game in the history that followed them?

It's probably someone old, for they have naturally had the longest time to affect the play of others: Ruy Lopez, Philidor... They were writers.

Without Steinitz, we might not have positional play, only the romantic "if a gambit is offered, you must accept it" shoot-'em-up style.

Botvinnik I think helped evolve chess into a serious game that you make into a respectable career, rising above the fray of say dominos or poker as a parlor game. His shadow looms large over his chess school and its future champions.

Fischer may have prevented chess from becoming a regional (Soviet) game, like Glinski's Hexagonal Chess or Shogi. Anand, too.

Kasparov is too recent to judge. Perhaps he was the first to achieve and maintain truly celebrity status, elevating chess to a game with celebrities fans adore (or despise). Did he take opening preparation to a new level, perhaps with the help of computers?

[hwgahgch] Incentives versus psychological programming

2012-01-20T03:24:00.002Z

Do people behave the way they do because of incentives or of psychological programming? All of economics is built on the assumption of the former.

Inspired by the observation that, in some people, not recycling causes an reflexive physical reaction of revulsion -- hate.

A great many attempts to shape society "for the better" try to attempt the latter: "We need to change how people behave without thinking."

The problem with psychological programming is, once programmed, you cannot easily reprogram people to behave differently by changing incentives. Suppose the world changes and the previously revulsive behavior is now preferred.

[wibafzgc] Real light sabers

2012-01-20T03:16:00.002Z

Energy-based tools that can cut through anything already exist:

* Oxyacetylene torch
* Laser cutter
* Plasma arc cutter

That scene in The Phantom Menace where the Jedis attempt with a light saber to cut through a thick blast door to the bridge can be done now.

[ftbmwafw] Transparent vertical go board

2012-01-20T02:55:00.004Z

Create a go 囲碁 board consisting of a large vertical transparent plexiglass sheet. This should be easy. The stones, preferably translucent, are hung on hooks. But if opaque, you can still see through the gaps between circular stones.

Kind of like the game of Battleship.

Captures need to be executed by the opponent.

The point is the game is merely an excuse for human interaction, so you can constantly see your opponent -- partner? -- through the board, instead of having to look away from them at the board.

This could also be done with many other board games. For chess, it would be similar to upright demonstration boards. But one player will have kings and queens (and long and short castle) reversed.

This could also be done electronically, as a video chat with a game overlay. Perhaps a mobile app.

[iqudihvh] Colossus of Rhode Island

2012-01-18T15:11:00.003Z

Create a skyscraper in the shape of a human figure, a giant statue. The goal is, through modern construction, to have it remain standing longer than the Colossus of Rhodes, maybe even longer than Great Pyramid.

Of difficulty is the human figure is cantilevered.

[ttsphlhn] Infinite HTML

2012-01-17T17:38:00.003Z

Consider a modification of HTML and HTTP to permit "infinite" documents. Instead of crashing the browser, the browser only loads a screenful (or so) at a time.

It is the byte-range selection of HTTP likely supercharged, with ability to select portions of an HTML document tree.

Currently, this is implemented with AJAX, for example the infinitely scrollable Google Maps.

Previously : html filesystem, automatic tree pruning.

Inspired by Haskell's lazy data structures.

[doyyxodb] Sex toy of the future

2012-01-17T17:28:00.002Z

A thought experiment:

The most controversial sex toy of the future will probably be a sex robot that fights you, and that you have to overpower it in order to have sex with it: a rape toy.

How will society react to such a machine?

Bestiality might go down.

Continuing the thought experiment: why does the machine sell well (assuming it does, for some value of "well")? Theorize it is some vestigial behavior left over from evolution. But for what purpose?

We have a primitive version already with virtual strip poker, with an animated or pre-filmed character. It combines sex drive with a sense of accomplishment.

[csozsogh] Computer chess 1-ply play out

2012-01-17T06:14:00.007Z

A chess program plays a game against another program. We will call the sequence of moves played the "main line". For each position on the main line, the computers also play out a complete game starting with every other alternative move from that position. For an N move game, there are 2N "alternate histories". These side lines do NOT have further side lines played out.

In essence, we are answering, "How would the game have turned out if some other move were played instead of the main line move?" This kind of counterfactual analysis is possible for computer players, so provides an extra dimension of entertainment for watching a computer tournament that is not possible for a human tournament.

This also provides data for program improvement. A programmer can look over a game for which the main line turned out worse than one of the side lines, e.g., the main line was a loss, but an alternative move would have won, and ask, why did my program choose the bad main line move instead of the better side line? (The answer might be, the played move was objectively better; the side line merely exposed a flaw in the opponent.)

I estimate such a tournament will take 1000 times more CPU than just playing the main line, but it seems a worthy thing to try once in a rare while, say at a prestigious computer chess tournament.

Previously, same idea to annotating human moves.

[vfvawars] Drinking with intent to drive

2012-01-16T04:36:00.002Z

The national drinking age of 21 is justified by drunken drivers on the road causing disruption to interstate commerce.

Consider a modification of the law which still preserves the spirit of the justification: a prosecutor must not only show under-21-in-possession, but also intent to drive while drunk. "Intent to X" does exist for other prosecutions.

Thus, it would become difficult to prosecute college students drinking in their own dorms, especially on an urban campus where no one owns a car.

How to make this law a reality.

[ttzbydsl] Personal Trust

2012-01-15T19:09:00.002Z

There seems to be only two mechanisms by which one person can deeply trust another:

* The trusted person has been provided incentives not to betray the trusting person. This is theoretical normal mechanism.

* The trusted person has been subjected to years of psychological programming in order to behave in a certain way (regardless of incentives). Parenting, Religion, Organized crime ("Family").

[dmgirlrz] Contradictory Coriolis

2012-01-14T22:39:00.002Z

Stand at a mid-latitude point on earth and sun passes over you from east to west.

Stand at a mid-latitude point on earth and weather patterns pass over you from west to east. It's definitely not the case that the atmosphere remains relatively still and the earth frictionlessly slides under it.

The Coriolis effect is invoked to explain both scenarios, but they are opposite directions.

Jet stream

[exqukuvh] Modeling a gas

2012-01-13T23:32:00.005Z

Start by modeling a two dimensional gas in an enclosed rectangle. This could be done by lots of elastic spheres bouncing off each other, but there are probably easier, more continuous ways. Initialize some high and low pressure areas, then let the system evolve. Assuming perfect conservation, there should result standing waves.

Instead of an enclosed box, do the simulation on the surface of a sphere -- no boundary conditions (or, periodic boundary conditions).

Tranform the simulation onto a reference frame of a rotating sphere. So far, this is super unrealistic: the gas is frictionlessly unaffected by the motion of the "ground", so the rotating reference frame just makes things look different.

Next, add a third dimension of altitude and gravity. Maybe next add an overhead heat source and PV=nRT.

Although this could be further elaborated to a global weather model, one can also stop and enjoy this conceptually simple model so far and its flowing patterns of high and low pressure areas.

[trmahbhl] Bose Einstein swing dancing

2012-01-13T23:32:00.004Z

Depict the transition of a gas to Bose-Einstein condensate in dance.

A large number of dancers begin dancing independently, each doing their own thing. Then a clump starts in the middle of dancers doing identical movements. The clump grows.

One way is unchoreographed Lindy Hop transitioning to everyone doing Balboa in phase.

Neat then would be some demonstration of wavelike properties of matter.

[uqdkkubs] Avoiding deletion hacking countermeasure

2012-01-13T00:15:00.003Z

Bad is a hacker compromising your account and doing something evil with it.

Worse is a hacker compromising your account, doing something evil with it, and the covering their tracks so you don't know what evil has been done.

Safeguard against the latter by making it difficult or impossible for the hacker cover tracks.

In the case of a email account, make it impossible to delete messages, or require a different password -- extra authentication -- for deleting. Or, encrypt "deleted" messages with a public key, requiring that extra password to undelete.

There is a potential privacy problem if you cannot delete your own messages. This might be fixed with stronger data privacy laws or other rearchitecting of society.

Or, replace deleted messages with undeletable "deleted" placeholders, which provide a hint that a hacker has been at work.

[ujrttxsy] Parody and satire on the campaign trail

2012-01-12T23:04:00.002Z

Create a show which fictionally depicts behind the scenes of the current campaign season, with a one-week delay from reality.

In particular, depict how campaign managers consider voters to be complete idiots, manipulatiing them with the basest of psychological propaganda.

(With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing.)

Wag the Dog

[svhybrnr] Steve Jobs

2012-01-12T22:50:00.002Z

Have you ever had the feeling of utter helplessness and frustration with your computer? This is Steve Jobs's most significant legacy and why he should be reviled instead of exalted.

From day 1, where the original Macintosh was designed to be impossible to open with normal tools like a screwdriver.

There's an anecdote of Steve Jobs meeting with architects about a new Apple corporation building: he nixed the architects' plans for sliding windows. Steve Jobs doesn't like people being able to open things.

Contrast Jobs's philosophy with the minority viewpoint of Richard Stallman's Free Software movement: software should always be modifiable by the user, and any user can share those modifications with anyone else.

I primarily use Free Software on my computers (Linux, etc.) and never feel that frustration that Mac (iPhone, etc.) users feel with their computer not acting the way they want it to, sometimes even deliberately designed to thwart certain actions you want to do. Instead, the worst I feel is unhappiness that I don't have the time or money to make the modification I want to the misbehaving software. (Sometimes I feel unhappiness at various others programmers heatedly egoistically arguing about how to modify some open-source software.) But there is nothing, in principle, from me fixing my computer, and that is a tremendously wonderful philosophy, directly at odds with that of Steve Jobs.

In contrast, if your Mac is broken, you're too stupid to fix it; only Geniuses at the Apple Store Genius Bar can help you... for a fee. What a great way to make money: make sure users are helpless.

Philosophies are hard to change. Thanks to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and others who push closed-source software (and locked-down hardware with DRM), their philosophy has become the overwhelmingly majority view. Most people just accept feeling helpless at their computer as reality, as something outside of their control.

You do have a choice. Reject Steve Jobs. Choose free and open-source software.

Without Steve Jobs, others would have certainly come around to invent the Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc. There are plenty of artists and designers out there obsessed with clean lines and form. Thus Steve Jobs's greatest impact on most people's daily lives, his greatest legacy, is that feeling of utter helplessness you feel being unable to fix or change or understand your computing machines.

[iijbfuzf] Limits of fault tolerance

2012-01-12T06:16:00.002Z

After attempting to account for all the possible failure modes you can think of, what is the probability of a failure that you didn't account for? I believe this number can be estimated well from past examples of unrelated projects and measures of complexity.

Included in this "unknown" failure mode are the probability that your accounting of the known failure modes was wrong, e.g., a math error. Also included is the human factor, which can induce infinitely creative new modes of failure.

Because of these unknown failures, there seems to be a limit to how safe something can be made, especially for one-off unique kinds of things.

Inspired by the biosafety level 4 lab in Boston.

[mdvtiahv] Housing bubble and high speed rail corridors

2012-01-12T01:43:00.002Z

The implosion of the housing bubble should have decreased the property acquisition costs of some proposed rail projects. Did it?

[jzmeghmr] Two handed keyboard already

2012-01-12T01:32:00.002Z

The two-handed disjoint keyboard concept has already been implemented in musical instruments such as the bandoneón, concertina, and accordion, with extremely virtuoso players (indicating it will work).

[kpypiruu] Parentheses minimization with square brackets

2012-01-06T01:27:00.009Z

Consider a tree structure written out as parentheses. Replace some pairs of parentheses with square brackets. For every closing square bracket, delete consecutive previous closing parenthesis: a square bracket is a "power" close paren that automatically closes all parenthesis up the the nearest open square bracket.

[((( () ((] is, for example, valid and is equivalent to (((( () (()) )))).

For a given tree, what is the optimal placement of square brackets to minimize the length of the string?

Is there an online algorithm to choose whether to use a opening square or round parenthesis, if you don't know the rest of the input? (I'm guessing not.)

There is a Lisp IDE which implements a simpler variation: the key right-square-bracket inserts enough parentheses to close all parentheses up to the top level.

[rvqcabms] Landmark cases against filesharing

2012-01-06T01:27:00.007Z

Capitol v. Thomas (previously named Virgin v. Thomas)
Sony BMG Music Entertainment et al. v. Tenenbaum (commonly called RIAA v. Tenenbaum)
MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. 545 U.S. 913 (2005)
Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, 715 F. Supp. 2d 481 (2010)

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/01/index-of-litigation-documents.html

Are there any cases about an ISP who tried to fight a John Doe subpoena request of an IP address?

File sharing software trying to use the ISP safe harbor provision?

[wbzbnddj] Argentine tango origin speculation

2012-01-06T01:27:00.006Z

The legend goes, Argentine tango was born in brothels of Buenos Aires, but exactly how? Rather than do research, let's speculate (maybe someday I'll learn which is right):

* Tango was a floor show for clients to pick prostitutes, perhaps a cover of a legitimate business. This probably requires hiring dance partners for the prostitutes.
* Tango was a show just to put clients in the right mood, and the dancers were distinct from the prostitutes. This obviates the need for each prostitute to know how to dance.
* Tango was a participatory activity for clients to audition prostitutes, to try to discover with whom might be good chemistry in bed. This requires clients also knowing how to dance. Perhaps this was a transition from a legitimate dance hall hiring extra dancers to even out the ratio.

[jvuutkjy] Toy computer

2012-01-05T23:11:00.021Z

Create a toy computer, with enough "rope" that the person -- a child -- playing with it can grasp Turing-completeness, with the awesome feeling, like Legos, that one could compute anything with this toy.

Assuming a traditional processor architecture, I'd suggest a 4 bit word size for general purpose registers, because such values can be displayed in a toy-like friendly manner in binary by four LEDs. One can easily comprehend all 16 possibilities. (Alternatively: base 10 computer).

A few special registers for accessing memory are much wider. Memory is cheap, so let's provide many gigabytes: You can compute anything with this toy!

ALU operations And, Or, Not, Increment, Decrement, Left and Right Shift by one bit. Omit Add?

A breakpoint instruction, to freeze and display all the registers.

Obviously, a few more instructions (compare, branch). What else?

A bit of a problem that the UI will probably require a computer fancier than the toy processor, suggesting it should be emulated,which sort of takes out the coolness.

The UI should support breakpoints, editing assembly language programs, saving and loading programs including old backups, saving and loading macros (an Add macro), maybe saving and loading libraries of functions, though it is "design your own calling convention". Perhaps a way of sharing programs between different computers.

What peripherals?

An alternative to the traditional processor is a completely different machine architecture, perhaps Lisp? Atoms are available as picture keys: flower, car, etc.

Yet another implementation might be Turing-complete cellular automata, though we would like to avoid exponential slowdown with the Counter Machine in Conway's Game of Life.

[stxezsgg] Polyspermy fertilization

2012-01-05T23:11:00.017Z

Normally, polyspermy is not viable. Can there be freak cases where it is? I'm imagining some chromosomes of one sperm and other chromosomes of another sperm pair up with the chromosomes of the egg.

In the entire family tree of the human race, is there a child with three biological parents? Along with viable polyspermy above, the mother needs to have had sex with two males in a short time span. (What species other than humans engage in orgies?)

Are their any living descendents of such a child? Can this be discovered by clever genome analysis of the current generation?

[czhvsvlu] Honeypot credit cards in customer databases

2012-01-05T23:11:00.015Z

If you have a database of customer's credit cards, consider also peppering it with honeypot cards which exist nowhere else other than in the database.

Then if any charges show up on such a credit card, you know your database has been compromised, perhaps by hacking.

Maybe make this required by law.

A criminal might circumvent such measures by obtaining two compromised lists of credit cards, and using only those which appear on both lists. But then, customers could supply unique credit card numbers to each store (CC companies should provide such an ability). But then, thieves might correlate by name, billing address, and phone number.

[cctjgdqe] Apocalypse strip club

2012-01-05T23:11:00.014Z

"The Apocalypse" would be a good name for a strip club: it means "revealing" in Greek.

[znfpxxuz] Capitalism will end poorly

2012-01-05T23:11:00.013Z

The corresponding question for capitalism as predictions about communism.

While capitalism, with its "invisible hand", theoretically has good properties, who was the first to predict correctly the modern outcome of market failures everywhere, including those caused concentrations of wealth and abuse of power? Was it Marx? Or was he merely making a contemporary observation and reaction rather than a prediction?

[owpeqlxw] Tracking lobbyists

2012-01-05T23:11:00.012Z

Make public knowledge which lobbyists represent which causes, and who interacts with which legislator.

Then, it may become politically shameful to be found out to interact with certain lobbyists, making it more expensive for a special interest to lobby for unpopular causes.

This may be a bad idea.

[kidanazy] Doublethink and censorship

2012-01-05T01:47:00.003Z

Doublethink is good: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Doublethink is bad: I believe in the freedom of speech, but I approve of the silencing of speech I find offensive.

[nvremkde] More public space for protests

2012-01-05T01:38:00.003Z

China, as it builds cities from scratch, learned its lesson from Tiananmen Square: do not provide public spaces suitable for protests.

Consider urban planning the other extreme: many, highly visible, easily accessible public spaces suitable for protests. Many protests will happen, which dilutes their messages so they lose their impact, paradoxically defeating protestors.

Of course, such spaces will be useful for many other things, too.

[aasuzsmn] Random sentence generator steganography

2012-01-04T21:52:00.002Z

Take every Nth letter to reveal the secret message. Generate grammatical text using a random sentence generator that meets this constraint.

A wrinkle: N is chosen by the generator to optimize the total length of the message.

Trickier still is a fancy random sentence generator which attempts to stay on a topic for successive sentences.

Similar to Memorizing binary.

[iamyldlv] Regulate the word "free"

2012-01-04T06:33:00.002Z

Consider regulating the use of the word "free" in advertising and business signage, prohibiting it from being used for example for adware and collecting private information in exchange for a product.

There will be very few products that will remain actually free.

[dilxhzub] Thwarting sniping in online auctions

2012-01-04T06:29:00.002Z

Have the end time of the auction not publicly announced at high resolution, only "after this point in time", perhaps use the exponential distribution or Poisson. (What should be its parameters?)

This hopefully causes bidders to privately immediately bid their true value (though the bidding mechanism should only announce a price that just beats the next highest bidder). This hopefully induces the price during most of the auction not to be artificially low until a sudden sniping strike at the end.

Perhaps announce cryptographic hash of "end time + nonce" which can be verified after the auction, as a slight assurance there is not bid rigging going on, e.g., waiting for some bidder to make the winning bid and immediately closing the auction.

[vhozplon] No fee ATM

2012-01-04T06:18:00.002Z

A business, say a hotel, wishes to place an ATM on its site, as a "side" convenience for its customers.

With limited space available, it asks for bids and offers the space to the bank which charges the lowest ATM fees to non-bank-customers (not counting fees charged by the non-bank-customer's own bank), ostensibly trying to maximize convenience for the business's customers.

Why aren't deals like this happening?

[jwwxlinz] Eminent domain on patents

2012-01-04T06:05:00.004Z

This is a straightforward solution to the chaining problem with History and Monopoly patents.

A firm B applies for a monopoly patent on technology Q to develop a product which can only be developed by infringing on an already existing monopoly patent P owned by firm A. However, included in B's business plan is the requirement that the state must purchase the existing patent P at its fair market value using the power of eminent domain, making its technology public domain. Then, firm A no longer has an advantage over any other firm for developing Q.

[yfweqinb] Standing

2012-01-04T05:35:00.002Z

When standing for hours at a time, I found standing barefeet (socks) a lot less painful than sneakers.

[dbmfjcco] Golden week

2011-12-28T22:28:00.003Z

In the USA, the big holidays are Christmas and New Year's, which, for arbitrary reasons made thousands of years ago, are in the dead of winter (Note how curious it is that Jesus's birthday lands on the same day each year, but resurrection moves around according to the Easter computus). Many people take travel on vacation during the week in between, but travel is unpleasant and hindered by cold and inclement weather.

In Japan, the Golden Week of holidays is in May. This makes a lot more sense, weatherwise.

An example of "path dependence".

[lwzsvalz] Future of orthodox chess

2011-12-28T01:17:00.003Z

Suppose the future of chess at the highest level is Chess960 (Fischer Random Chess), which better measures individual skill rather than the player's opening preparation team.

Then, what is the future of orthodox chess (position 518)? It will continue to remain relevant in correspondence chess, advanced chess, and team chess. It adds perhaps a whole new dimension to team chess, which might be played as consultation games (among the team) in separate rooms. Or, in a "win and continue" team tournament format: the other players still contribute opening preparation.

What will amateurs play? Probably both.

[klipqwej] Flying bullet as a terrorist device

2011-12-28T00:59:00.002Z

A small, solar-powered, autonomous flying (or floating) device is launched half a world away. Over weeks or months, it slowly makes its way toward its target, using GPS, evading detection because it is so small.

Upon reaching its target, an elementary school playground in an affluent neighborhood, it uses visual targeting to close in and fire its payload, either a single bullet or a poisoned dart, at a white child (taking advantage that the media is racist biased).

At perhaps several thousand dollars per kill (many machines won't survive the intercontinental flight), it is not an effective weapon of war: It is a weapon of terror.

I believe all the technology needed to build this device already exists. How can we fight it?

Some is public relations: the probability is getting killed by such a device is astronomically low. Some is reducing the enmity that an enemy would be willing to spend that much money on a kill. (The standard defenses against terrorism.)

Peacetime uses for such a craft include courier service to remote areas not served by postal service (or for which the post cannot be trusted). Emergency messaging for people marooned on a deserted island or lost at sea. A personal Valentine's message delivery.

[ojmneguh] Line-item tax evasion and jury nullification

2011-12-28T00:08:00.004Z

Suppose, after calculating the tax you owe, the government provides a breakdown of where your tax dollars go. After which point, you can strike out items you don't wish to pay, and pay the rest.

It is illegal to strike out any items. The government prosecutes you for tax evasion, but not tax evasion in general, but tax evasion for specifically each item you refused to pay. You are granted a jury trial, at which point the government needs to convince a jury to unanimously agree that it is indeed a crime not to pay taxes for that line item. Such a trial may be difficult (with the threat of jury nullification) if the line item is very unpopular. The purpose of this mechanism is to avoid sleazy political manuevers which result in higher taxes: the purpose is better government.

If a criminal law passes by a slim 51% majority, it will never survive trials by jury; it's certain that a member of the 49% will hang any jury. This is checks and balances between the branches of government in action. Therefore, why should a budget which passes by 51% have force of law not able to be checked by the judicial branch?

However, the result to society, if implemented like this, will likely be complete anarchy, perhaps putting most of the populace on trial. How can we prevent anarchy?

The government can present a different breakdown of taxes per person, reflecting the items they are most likely to agree to pay. How can the government do this? Should each tax payer decide on breakdown? For each tax evasion, you are offered a settlement to pay more on items you care about, to make up for a shortfall of others refusing to pay. So long as you end up paying the total you owe, the government drops charges. Some devilish details remain.

We need to avoid money laundering though debt, where an unpopular item is first paid for not by taxes, but by debt spending, then later taxes are raised to pay down the debt.

[atciapyx] Bribes accepted

2011-12-26T23:22:00.003Z

A politician announces, "All Bribes Accepted. Make checks out to the U.S. Treasury." That is, the politician does not personally benefit from the bribe.

A bribe attached to a message to the politician serves to signal how important the sender believes the message. The politician may pay attention according to how much the bribe is, and may even vote depending on which side bribes more. In effect, the public (via contributions to the Treasury) recovers some of the cost of the corruption of government, because the briber has incentive to bribe up to the amount of benefit from the successful bribe.

A similar idea as presented in one dollar per vote, but with a human in the loop. As before, to avoid the All Pay Auction, unsuccessful bribes should be returned.

[ljyiqfcj] Keyboard with more keys

2011-12-26T22:56:00.002Z

I feel a significant pleasant sensation of ease when I encounter a keyboard for which a two-key combination is on a single key. Notable recent examples are the unshifted question mark, colon, and "at" sign on some full keyboard phones.

Take this concept much further to computer keyboards, again creating a space-cadet keyboard, with many more keys.

A cheap way to accomplish this is with two keyboards, set up kind of like an organ. The upper keyboard offers all the shifted punctuation keys, plus macros that can be assigned to each letter. Perhaps common words or syllables.

We need some operating system support to distinguish to keyboards from each other.

[ueneqbhw] Window shading without compositing

2011-12-24T20:46:00.002Z

A minimalist window manager without title bars or borders needs a way to indicate which window has focus.

If you have compositing, one way to do it is, if you press the "Tell Me Which Window is Focused" key combination, all the non-focused windows get shaded darker (or blurred, etc.). The same can happen when cycling or switching between windows.

If you don't have compositing, you can get an extreme version of darker shading by painting over the non-focused windows black (or showing desktop background), temporarily completely hiding the non-focused windows.

An idea for XMonad, so I can recover that 1 pixel wide red border of screen real estate. Perhaps someone has already implemented this.

[txzivaxj] Anticultural fusion restaurant

2011-12-24T00:36:00.002Z

A restaurant specializes in paradoxical cuisine: food cooked in the tradition of one cuisine but intentionally breaking rules of that tradition or culture, thus creating something that generally does not exist.

American cuisine I probably know the best, so we combine the most typical American cuisine with its cultural taboos:
Horse burger, or steak
Offal etc. (though Rocky Mountain oysters already exist, capturing our deep-fry tradition)
Escargot etc.
Insects etc.
Dog, cat

Indian:
Curried beef

Middle eastern (including kosher and halal):
Pork shawarma
Pastrami and cheese

Chinese and Japanese:
Dairy, e.g., stir-fry and cheese, cheesy sushi (this is already done with the Philadelphia roll)

Many of these already exist.

[niiitipa] Shopping online at the store

2011-12-24T00:26:00.002Z

A store, with limited shelf space, offers a kiosk for additional online shopping in one corner of its store. However, unlike online shopping at home, this is a step beyond.

As a single installation per store, using very powerful computers, graphics, networks, very large, high-resolution displays, the store attempts to capture technology perhaps 10 years down the road. Perhaps gesture and speech recognition (perhaps there's a human on the other end!). Imperceptible latency on all UI. No regular consumer can afford such a system, but for a store it might only be the equivalent of a month of property tax (and it will pay for itself with increased sales).

[ggaoegjp] Hard drive data recovery for dummies

2011-12-23T23:37:00.003Z

Consider the operation of disassembling a broken hard drive, installing its platters into another empty drive, then reading the data off of them. Make this process cheap and easy to do for regular people. (Currently a specialty shop, hundreds of dollars.)

The general idea is hard drives have many single points of failure, with which nowadays a consumer would simply consider the data lost, despite the data is still existing on the platters. With wonderful error-correcting codes, it is in fact very difficult to accidentally destroy the the entirety of data by mechanical failure. The goal is a change in mindset: once you write data, it really is permanent, short of the drive becoming completely destroyed.

One possible implementation is standardized construction of hard drives. A vending machine-like kiosk accepts the hard drive down the chute. A internal robot disassembles and carries out the operation in a clean environment. Twenty five cents.

Another implementation is, of course, cheap labor.

I think we might need to increase the amount of error correction so that data will more likely survive even imperfect disassembly and reassembly.

Repeat for solid state drives.

[wtlguzdc] Hiding a circle in a grid

2011-12-23T23:23:00.002Z

Draw a large circle on a large grid of squares, and note which squares the circle passes through.

Color some of the squares in the grid in an almost uniform random pattern. The only constraint is squares on the circle path may not be colored. Next, erase the circle.

How computationally difficult is it to recover the original circle from the pattern of colored and uncolored squares? What density should the coloring be to maximize difficulty while avoiding lots of spurious solutions? How does the difficulty change with shapes other than a circle? Three or more dimensions?

Can this be the basis for a public-key cryptography algorithm (the hidden circle is the private key)?

Yet another inspiration from bathroom tiles.

[siyqisto] Everyone is born a genius

2011-12-22T18:57:00.009Z

Every baby is born a genius, capable of incredible mental feats of intelligence. The most famous ones include language acquisition, learning social rules and context, temporal reasoning of cause and effect, motor control, three dimensional vision and spatial reasoning, but there are many, many more. The ones listed happen to be fields in AI, wherein one realizes just how difficult these tasks are when trying to make a computer do them.

From this perspective, consider the point of education, especially primary education, not to be to make the student smarter, but just to prevent the student from becoming stupid. Maintain the curiousity, inquisitiveness, absorption ability, flexibility to new and different concepts. These skills will be important for critical thinking later in life.

There is probably a lot already done in education and psychology research, but likely a lot remaining to do, about how "the stupid" develops. Primary education might end up looking very different.

The success of such an education can be measured through tests. The tests always test something completely new, something far different from anything the student has never encountered. (In this wide world of ours, there is always something new.) The tests are a tests of mental flexibility, and perhaps can be graded against how well a baby or very young child will do at each task.

These will be the weirdest tests. You cannot study for them because you don't know what they will be, by design. They are radically different from today's standardized tests, for which the curriculum is known (and arguably flawed), so the teacher can teach targeting success on the tests.

Speculate that illiteracy is caused by the ability to learn to read already having been destroyed by the time of teaching reading. That's why the student fails to learn to read even though other students in the same class succeed. There seems to be a correlation of poverty and illiteracy. Which actions in childhood poverty destroyed the ability to learn to read? I speculate too much "don't do X" for many X seemingly unrelated to literacy, but shuts down the brain.

Education is neither the filling of a pail nor the lighting of a fire. It is the keeping lit of the original fire, preventing it from being extinguished.

[aifmzmuk] Soapbox rapid turn without flipping

2011-12-21T00:30:00.003Z

Create a gravity-powered vehicle with human driver that can make the tight 110-degree turn at the base of the Building 66 68 basement tunnel, and not lose very much energy.

Regenerative braking is one way, though not very exciting.

[vteygjjc] Mobile computer with long battery life

2011-12-21T00:07:00.004Z

The world still awaits a mobile computer with battery life measured in years instead of hours. I think the technology already exists.

LCD or E-Ink screen. Processor probably running in the low MHz not GHz. Probably a different radio protocol than 802.11 to send and receive at very low power but low bandwidth.

It's a modern reworking of the programmable graphing calculator, but general purpose (with an OS) and with more (solid state) storage.

Vast speed up when connected to external power.

It will work well for reading and writing text, which is what many people mostly do anyways.

[gnlakdzg] Swing dancing and copyright

2011-12-20T19:51:00.003Z

Swing dancing was invented in the 1920s in Harlem, New York. Many dancers contributed moves and styling to the dance form, developing it to what it is today.

Certainly, a new swing move is a human invention, so in principle ownable as intellectual property. However, no such intellectual property rights were asserted, which was good. If copyright were asserted on swing moves, you would have to negotiate licenses from each creator for each swing move you might do in a dance. Instructors, even informal friends teaching friends (that's peer-to-peer sharing!), would have to acquire licenses for each move they plan to teach. If you wish to modify a move, you would still need to acquire a license: a modification of an original move is a derivative work and protected by the original copyright. For every license not acquired, you face a copyright infringement lawsuit of up to $150,000 per swing move.

I advocate weaker copyright law, especially for non-commercial copying. The fear is that weaker copyright will destroy creativity and innovation. Swing dance provides a counterexample: tremendous creativity and intellectual output happened despite no copyright protection. In fact, the lack of copyright caused MORE innovation as dancers were free to build on others' work. When you look at how much has been accomplished in the past century, swing is perhaps the most innovative, most creative, most profound development of dance ever, all made possible by the lack of copyright on moves.

Development of swing dancing continues today: it is a living art form -- it is culture, and by tradition, dancers still don't try to assert copyright on moves they create, even though the law certainly now permits it.

The tradition of not copyrighting swing dance moves stems from an earlier tradition of much weaker copyright 90 years ago, or even the complete lack of even the concept of copyright 500 years ago. People now may find it hard to imagine a world without copyright, when straight copying without permission, or copying and modifying, was not considered morally or ethically wrong even in the slightest. It's what people did, and there was never a problem with that. People created knowing they would be copied; in fact, hoping they would be copied, because then you have actually contributed something positive to the world.

So, in swing dancing we have a literally tangible preservation of what the mentality of copying was in the pre copyright era. And we can still see how creativity and innovation thrives without copyright within the art form.

(Part 2 will continue about jazz music.)

[paxzzekj] A life of crime

2011-12-20T05:35:00.002Z

There are some who choose a life of crime, which is a shame because their skills could be better applied elsewhere.

There are others who are forced into a life of crime because they have no other opportunities, arguably a flaw in society.

There is a gray area in between.

How should the justice system treat each kind of criminal? Should it distinguish despite the same crime being committed?

[henxmuqd] Earthquake over 9000

2011-12-19T21:47:00.003Z

What does the seismograph say about the earthquake's magnitude level?

It's over 9000!

What, 9000?! There's no way that can be right!

(A magnitude-9000 earthquake releases 3*10^13486 times more energy than a magnitude-9 earthquake, which is considerably more than the E=mc^2 mass energy of the observable universe.)

[bbwjsktd] Benchmarking modular exponentiation of Pari/GP

2011-12-17T21:05:00.002Z

Some benchmarking of modular exponentiation for Cullen primes. Times are in milliseconds.

model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     P7570  @ 2.26GHz

 GP/PARI CALCULATOR Version 2.5.0 (released)
 i686 running linux (ix86/GMP-5.0.1 kernel) 32-bit version
 compiled: Sep  4 2011, gcc-4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-7ubuntu2)

? allocatemem(6*10^8)
  ***   Warning: new stack size = 600000000 (572.205 Mbytes).

? gettime;for(i=1,15,c=cullen[i];p=1+c*2^c;print(Mod(1,p)==Mod(2,p)^((p-1)/2));print(c," ",gettime))
1
141 0
1
4713 244
1
5795 429
1
6611 576
1
18496 6953
1
32292 27149
1
32469 27374
1
59656 119627
1
90825 333105
1
262419 3532668
1
361275 6784853
1
481899 11800874
1
1354828 113855267

Final entry is 1.3 days. Going by roughly quadratic growth, the next exponent 6328548 will take 30 to 40 days.

[ikuxtpuq] Metadata ad infinitum

2011-12-14T23:20:00.002Z

You have data. You have some metadata describing the data. You have some metadata describing the metadata. What format is extensible to an arbitrary height of meta?

Three-tuples for knowledge representation? (Two "nouns" and a relationship between them.)

[duaxdnal] Golden circle map

2011-12-14T18:12:00.002Z

A ball bounces inside a circle, going in chords of 2pi/phi per leg, i.e., golden ratio of the circumference.

The path never repeats because of irrationality; however, to accurately depict a large number of bounces requires a high precision calculation of phi. Create an algorithm which uses a spigot algorithm, so the simulation can run indefinitely without having to calculate all the digits initially. Fibonacci numbers might be involved. Can the running time remain constant per bounce?

Draw the path in the style of pi paths, with paths going under. It will be a space-filling curve (with intersections).

The ball never hits the same point on the circumference twice. An irrational number can be completely specified by a discrete sequence of old points each new bounce falls in between, specified by index number. How computationally difficult is it to compute this sequence?

How can we reconstruct the number from a sequence? Maintain a bounds from a whole bunch of inequalities. Knowing bounds, perhaps some bounces may be losslessly left unspecified as data compression.

[chysqkkv] Chess openings

2011-12-14T07:51:00.005Z

A look at some chess openings of recent tournaments: Sao Paulo / Bilbao Final Masters, Tal Memorial, London Chess Classic:

Adams, Michael as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4	B92 Sicilian - Najdorf, Opovcensky variation
Adams, Michael as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C65 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence
Adams, Michael as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Adams, Michael as white	1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 h6	C03 French - Tarrasch
Adams, Michael as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Adams, Michael as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 Bb4+	E00 Catalan opening
Adams, Michael as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C88 Ruy Lopez - closed, 7...O-O
Adams, Michael as black	1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nf3 d5	C36 KGA - Abbazia defence, modern variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E32 Nimzo-Indian - classical variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D58 QGD - Tartakower (Makagonov-Bondarevsky) system
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7	E70 King's Indian - Kramer system
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7	E97 King's Indian - orthodox, Aronin-Taimanov, bayonet attack
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D85 Gruenfeld - exchange variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D97 Gruenfeld - Russian, Alekhine (Hungarian) variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 dxc4	D10 QGD Slav defence, Alekhine variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D16 QGD Slav - Soultanbeieff variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C84 Ruy Lopez - closed defence
Anand, Viswanathan as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 f5	C63 Ruy Lopez - Schliemann defence
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 g6	A04 Reti opening
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. c4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nf3 Nf6	D43 QGD semi-Slav
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E12 Queen's Indian - 4.Nc3
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - 4.Nf3
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D56 QGD - Lasker defence
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bb5+ Bd7	B52 Sicilian - Canal-Sokolsky attack, 3...Bd7
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4	B92 Sicilian - Najdorf, Opovcensky variation
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. e4 c6 2. Nc3 d5 3. Nf3 Bg4	B11 Caro-Kann - two knights, 3...Bg4
Anand, Viswanathan as black	1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 Bf5	B12 Caro-Kann - advance variation
Aronian, Levon as white	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 d5	D55 QGD - Neo-orthodox variation, 7.Bxf6
Aronian, Levon as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 c6 3. e3 Nf6	D94 Gruenfeld - Smyslov defence
Aronian, Levon as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 e6 3. d4 Nf6	D37 QGD - 4.Nf3
Aronian, Levon as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 c6	D12 QGD Slav - 4.e3 Bf5
Aronian, Levon as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 c6	D15 QGD Slav - 4.Nc3
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E15 Queen's Indian - 4.g3
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E15 Queen's Indian - Nimzovich variation (exaggerated fianchetto)
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - 4.Nf3
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D41 QGD - Semi-Tarrasch, 5.cd
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D82 Gruenfeld - 4.Bf4
Aronian, Levon as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 dxc4	D10 QGD Slav defence, Alekhine variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 c5 3. c4 dxc4	D02 Queen's pawn game, Krause variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D31 QGD - Charousek (Petrosian) variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D31 QGD - Charousek (Petrosian) variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D31 QGD - Charousek (Petrosian) variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Aronian, Levon as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6	B09 Pirc - Austrian attack, 6.Bd3
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C84 Ruy Lopez - closed defence
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C84 Ruy Lopez - closed defence
Aronian, Levon as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C84 Ruy Lopez - closed defence
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E12 Queen's Indian - 4.Nc3
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D86 Gruenfeld - exchange, classical variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D12 QGD Slav - 4.e3 Bf5
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D12 QGD Slav - 4.e3 Bf5
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D55 QGD - Petrosian variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bb5+ Bd7	B52 Sicilian - Canal-Sokolsky attack, Sokolsky variation
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C65 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C84 Ruy Lopez - closed defence
Carlsen, Magnus as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6	C50 Giuoco Pianissimo
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 d5	D55 QGD - Neo-orthodox variation, 7.Bxf6
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 c6	D12 QGD Slav - 4.e3 Bf5
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. Nf3 g6 2. e4 Bg7 3. d4 d6	A04 Reti opening
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. c4 e5 2. g3 Nf6 3. Bg2 h6	A20 English opening
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E15 Queen's Indian - Nimzovich variation (exaggerated fianchetto)
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E15 Queen's Indian - Nimzovich variation (exaggerated fianchetto)
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D58 QGD - Tartakower (Makagonov-Bondarevsky) system
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D59 QGD - Tartakower (Makagonov-Bondarevsky) system, 8.cd Nxd5
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D82 Gruenfeld - 4.Bf4
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D85 Gruenfeld - exchange variation
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C78 Ruy Lopez - 5.O-O
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5	C50 Giuoco Pianissimo - Italian four knights variation
Carlsen, Magnus as black	1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Nf6	C11 French - Steinitz, Boleslavsky variation
Gelfand, Boris as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Gelfand, Boris as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Gelfand, Boris as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5	E06 Catalan - closed, 5.Nf3
Gelfand, Boris as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D80 Gruenfeld - Stockholm variation
Gelfand, Boris as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 e6 3. g3 dxc4	A13 English opening - Agincourt variation
Gelfand, Boris as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Gelfand, Boris as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Gelfand, Boris as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D12 QGD Slav - 4.e3 Bf5
Gelfand, Boris as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D45 QGD semi-Slav - Stoltz variation
Howell, David W L as white	1. e4 c5 2. c3 e6 3. d4 d5	B22 Sicilian - Alapin's variation (2.c3)
Howell, David W L as white	1. e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6	B09 Pirc - Austrian attack, 6.Bd3
Howell, David W L as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C88 Ruy Lopez - closed, 7...O-O
Howell, David W L as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 exd4	C45 Scotch game
Howell, David W L as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 dxc4	D27 QGA - classical, 6...a6
Howell, David W L as black	1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. g3 Bb4	A22 English - Bremen, Smyslov system
Howell, David W L as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D16 QGD Slav - Soultanbeieff variation
Howell, David W L as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C65 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. c4 e5 2. g3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Bc5	A20 English opening
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E12 Queen's Indian - 4.Nc3
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D56 QGD - Lasker defence
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D80 Gruenfeld defence
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D82 Gruenfeld - 4.Bf4
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D45 QGD semi-Slav - Stoltz variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4	B43 Sicilian - Kan, 5.Nc3
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as white	1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Nf6	C11 French - Steinitz, Boleslavsky variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	A15 English opening
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 e6 3. d4 Nf6	D37 QGD - 4.Nf3
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 c6	D15 QGD Slav - 4.Nc3
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D83 Gruenfeld - Gruenfeld gambit, Capablanca variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. d4 e6 2. c4 Bb4+ 3. Nd2 Nf6	A40 Queen's pawn - Franco-Indian (Keres) defence
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4	B32 Sicilian - Labourdonnais-Loewenthal (Kalashnikov) variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4	B46 Sicilian - Taimanov variation
Ivanchuk, Vassily as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 f5	C63 Ruy Lopez - Schliemann defence
Karjakin, Sergey as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4	B92 Sicilian - Najdorf, Opovcensky variation
Karjakin, Sergey as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4	B42 Sicilian - Kan, 5.Bd3
Karjakin, Sergey as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4	B46 Sicilian - Taimanov variation
Karjakin, Sergey as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C84 Ruy Lopez - closed defence
Karjakin, Sergey as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E32 Nimzo-Indian - classical variation
Karjakin, Sergey as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E32 Nimzo-Indian - classical variation
Karjakin, Sergey as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E12 Queen's Indian - 4.Nc3
Karjakin, Sergey as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5	E06 Catalan - closed, 5.Nf3
Karjakin, Sergey as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5	E06 Catalan - closed, 5.Nf3
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5	E04 Catalan - open, 5.Nf3
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	A15 English opening
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 e5	A37 English - symmetrical, Botvinnik system reversed
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 c6	D15 QGD Slav - 4.Nc3
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 dxc4	D27 QGA - classical, 6...a6
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. c4 e5 2. g3 Nf6 3. Bg2 h6	A20 English opening
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 Bb4+	E00 Catalan opening
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5	E06 Catalan - closed, 5.Nf3
Kramnik, Vladimir as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 e6 3. g3 dxc4	A13 English opening - Agincourt variation
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E21 Nimzo-Indian - three knights variation
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D41 QGD - Semi-Tarrasch, 5.cd
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C48 Four knights - Rubinstein counter-gambit, exchange variation
Kramnik, Vladimir as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C65 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence
McShane, Luke J as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. g3 d5	B40 Sicilian defence
McShane, Luke J as white	1. e4 c6 2. Nc3 d5 3. Nf3 Bg4	B11 Caro-Kann - two knights, 3...Bg4
McShane, Luke J as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C65 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence
McShane, Luke J as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6	C78 Ruy Lopez - 5.O-O
McShane, Luke J as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nf6 3. c4 c6	D15 QGD Slav - 4.Nc3
McShane, Luke J as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C65 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence
McShane, Luke J as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 exd4	C45 Scotch game
McShane, Luke J as black	1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nf3 h6	C34 KGA - Becker defence
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. c4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. Nf3 Nf6	D43 QGD semi-Slav
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nc6 3. g3 Bc5	A25 English - Sicilian reversed
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. g3 Bb4	A22 English - Bremen, Smyslov system
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 d6 3. g3 g6	A21 English opening
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E15 Queen's Indian - Nimzovich variation (exaggerated fianchetto)
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5	D59 QGD - Tartakower (Makagonov-Bondarevsky) system, 8.cd Nxd5
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D83 Gruenfeld - Gruenfeld gambit, Capablanca variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D86 Gruenfeld - exchange, classical variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D31 QGD - Charousek (Petrosian) variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D31 QGD - Charousek (Petrosian) variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D31 QGD - Charousek (Petrosian) variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. d4 e6 2. c4 Bb4+ 3. Nd2 Nf6	A40 Queen's pawn - Franco-Indian (Keres) defence
Nakamura, Hikaru as white	1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nf3 d5	C36 KGA - Abbazia defence, modern variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. g3 d5	E04 Catalan - open, 5.Nf3
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7	E91 King's Indian - 6.Be2
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	A15 English opening
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 c6 3. e3 Nf6	D94 Gruenfeld - Smyslov defence
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7	E70 King's Indian - Kramer system
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7	E97 King's Indian - orthodox, Aronin-Taimanov, bayonet attack
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D55 QGD - Petrosian variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4	B70 Sicilian - dragon variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4	B92 Sicilian - Najdorf, Opovcensky variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4	B43 Sicilian - Kan, 5.Nc3
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. g3 d5	B40 Sicilian defence
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C67 Ruy Lopez - Berlin defence, open variation
Nakamura, Hikaru as black	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6	C50 Giuoco Pianissimo
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as white	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4	E32 Nimzo-Indian - classical variation
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as white	1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Be7	D37 QGD - classical variation (5.Bf4)
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4	B32 Sicilian - Labourdonnais-Loewenthal (Kalashnikov) variation
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4	B70 Sicilian - dragon variation
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as black	1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 e5	A04 Reti opening
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as black	1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 e5	A37 English - symmetrical, Botvinnik system reversed
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D80 Gruenfeld - Stockholm variation
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D97 Gruenfeld - Russian, Alekhine (Hungarian) variation
Nepomniachtchi, Ian as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bb5+ Bd7	B52 Sicilian - Canal-Sokolsky attack, Sokolsky variation
Short, Nigel D as white	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bb5+ Bd7	B52 Sicilian - Canal-Sokolsky attack, 3...Bd7
Short, Nigel D as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 Nf6	C48 Four knights - Rubinstein counter-gambit, exchange variation
Short, Nigel D as white	1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5	C50 Giuoco Pianissimo - Italian four knights variation
Short, Nigel D as white	1. e4 e5 2. f4 exf4 3. Nf3 h6	C34 KGA - Becker defence
Short, Nigel D as black	1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 d6 3. g3 g6	A21 English opening
Short, Nigel D as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 b6	E15 Queen's Indian - 4.g3
Short, Nigel D as black	1. e4 c5 2. c3 e6 3. d4 d5	B22 Sicilian - Alapin's variation (2.c3)
Short, Nigel D as black	1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 h6	C03 French - Tarrasch
Svidler, Peter as white	1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 e5	A04 Reti opening
Svidler, Peter as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 e6 3. g3 dxc4	A13 English opening - Agincourt variation
Svidler, Peter as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. c4 e6 3. g3 dxc4	A13 English opening - Agincourt variation
Svidler, Peter as white	1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 Bf5	B12 Caro-Kann - advance variation
Svidler, Peter as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D80 Gruenfeld defence
Svidler, Peter as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D82 Gruenfeld - 4.Bf4
Svidler, Peter as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D86 Gruenfeld - exchange, classical variation
Svidler, Peter as black	1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	D86 Gruenfeld - exchange, classical variation
Svidler, Peter as black	1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4	B42 Sicilian - Kan, 5.Bd3
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as white	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7	E91 King's Indian - 6.Be2
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as white	1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5	A15 English opening
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as white	1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. Nc3 g6	A04 Reti opening
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as white	1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 c5 3. c4 dxc4	D02 Queen's pawn game, Krause variation
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as white	1. Nf3 g6 2. e4 Bg7 3. d4 d6	A04 Reti opening
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as black	1. c4 e5 2. Nc3 Nc6 3. g3 Bc5	A25 English - Sicilian reversed
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as black	1. c4 e5 2. g3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Bc5	A20 English opening
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 dxc4	D10 QGD Slav defence, Alekhine variation
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 dxc4	D10 QGD Slav defence, Alekhine variation
Vallejo Pons, Francisco as black	1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6	D12 QGD Slav - 4.e3 Bf5

[qrvgjjtk] Unclogging anonymous publishing

2011-12-13T05:49:00.002Z

Anonymous publishing is desirable (even essential) for democratic society, e.g., The Federalist Papers, whistleblowers. Suppose an anonymous publishing platform is developed. It quickly becomes flooded with copyright violations, child pornography, and spam, preventing important speech from getting through. (Freenet is the stereotypical example.)

Client-side tagging can defeat spam.

Child pornography can be reduced on the anonymous platform by legalizing its non-anonymous transmission.

Similarly, file sharing of copyrighted material can be reduced on the anonymous platform by legalizing non-commercial copying.

The proper functioning of a democracy is being indirectly impeded by censorship of child pornography and overzealous copyright enforcement. One restriction of free speech causes another restriction because of channel capacity.

[kxqcymux] Sonnet app

2011-12-13T05:10:00.002Z

All of Shakespeare's sonnets in the palm of your hand. A simple programming exercise. Provide search.

The goal is to learn to write sonnets by studying the master.

[hqjaefmg] Compressed English text output filter

2011-12-13T00:56:00.002Z

English text contains a lot of entropy which could be losslessly compressed, if you could learn to read the compressed version. Mobile devices could present more data on their small screens.

Learn to read it gradually using a similar idea as typeface morphing. A filter processes everything you read.

[dgokhmib] Case statements thwart point-free

2011-12-13T00:28:00.002Z

Case expressions in Haskell force binding values to names in two places, suggesting future improvements to syntax to encourage point-free programming style.

The first is the expression being examined. We would like to do this: f . \e -> case e of { ... } . g but without having to name it e. Here is a simple addition to syntax to fix this: f . LAMBDACASE { ... } . g . It might make sense to deprecate plain case and always use LAMBDACASE.

The second is capturing values in pattern matching. Haskell lacks a syntax to take the value from a pattern binding and pass it along to a function without ever having to assign the value to a bound variable name. We want f $ g $ case e of { Foo x -> x } without ever having to temporarily name x. Here is one possible weird syntax: FUNCTIONCASE e of { Foo \(f . g) }. If the constructor has many fields, then the other captured variables are available, for example to a curried function : FUNCTIONCASE e of { Foo x _ _ \(f x y) _ _ y }

This effect is somewhat possible with named fields (record syntax).

We probably want LAMBDAFUNCTIONCASE to combine these.

[ulwrrrtq] Clit output device

2011-12-12T18:04:00.002Z

The clitoris has high density of nerve endings. Can it be used as a high-resolution high-bandwidth tactile computer interface (perhaps for the blind)? You only get aroused if you feel like getting aroused.

Keeping it sanitary is left as an exercise for the reader.

[rimjnlzt] Look to this day

2011-12-12T04:14:00.005Z

look to this day for it is life the very life of life in its brief course lie all the realities and truths of existence the joy of growth the splendor of action the glory of power for yesterday is but a memory and tomorrow is only a vision but today well lived makes every yesterday a memory of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope look well therefore to this day

What is the origin of this poem?

Some internet sources say "ancient Sanskrit", but there is no known Sanskrit original. There are various slightly different versions floating around, suggesting it is a translation from something.

A Google Books search finds "Congressional record: proceedings and debates of the ... Congress, Volume 110, Part 13 Govt. Print. Off., 1874" as the earliest work with the quote.