THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
04/21/06 -- Vol. 24, No. 43, Whole Number 1331
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Fowl Play (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Illegal Prime Numbers (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Poor . . . Math (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Question on MUNICH (film comment by Mark R. Leeper)
Harry Potter's Age (letter of comment by David Goldfarb)
This Week's Reading (V FOR VENDETTA , THE PERIODIC TABLE,
and GOLEMS AMONG US) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Fowl Play (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I wrote some years ago about the loss of traditional duck values.
I heard that ducks robbed a local bank. They got away, free as
birds, carrying away over $100,000 in small bills. Police had to
use a decoy to catch them. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Illegal Prime Numbers (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
[A word of explanation before I begin: in the following article I
am going to mention prime numbers. Now it is customary in
American writing that when an author mentions prime numbers, he
should also define for the reader what a prime numbers is. In
fact if they use the terms as simple as "even number" they
explain that "An even number is a number that can be divided by
two. Even numbers are those whole numbers that end in 0, 2, 4,
6, and 8. Even numbers the reader might be familiar with include
16 and 22, but not 5, 13, or 19." Then in the next article they
will say something like, "he punted with a three-quarter
touchback to the end zone in double-overtime scrimmage." There
will be not a single word of explanation as to what all that
verbal granola means. It will just be assumed that OF COURSE you
know what that all means, because it is after all sports terms.
Everybody knows sports terms. I will just say for the benefit of
those readers who are unaware of what a prime number is, you guys
are really thick and need to get with the program.]
It has come to my attention that there is such a thing as an
illegal prime number. Well, there are all sorts of prime
numbers. There are Mersenne primes and Fermat primes for
example, but this was the first I had ever heard anyone refer to
there being an "illegal" prime. What could that mean? Now it
was immediately obvious that we did not mean illegal in the
criminal sense. They cannot mean it in the sense of use-this-
prime-you-might-go-to-jail. I mean prime numbers belong to
everyone. No, surely there was some axiom or something that they
break. There has to be some technical reason why something would
be called an "illegal prime." What I discovered they mean is
that these primes are numbers that are illegal in the sense that
their use is prohibited by law and if you use-these-primes-you-
might-go-to-jail.
How and why should a prime number become illegal? Well let us
start out with whether any information can be illegal to have and
to pass on to other people. Well, certainly it can. Credit card
information is illegal for you to possess. And certainly you
cannot make it available to other people. Some moonbat might
make a case that the privacy of no information should protected
by law, but few people would support such a case. I think nearly
all of us believe that some information is private and should be
kept from the prying eyes of other members of the public and very
probably from the prying eyes of the United States Government.
We all have a right to the privacy of some information, even if
the current government is trying to redefine those boundaries of
that information. So let us assume there is some information
that it is illegal to have and to pass to other people.
That information probably can be stored on a computer. Well, any
piece of information stored in a computer is stored as a string
of ones and zeroes. So if possessing and sharing the information
can be made illegal, possessing and sharing some strings of ones
and zeroes can be illegal. Well, that seems pretty obvious
also. Your Social Security number is not something that I am
allowed to have and certainly making it available to other
people. But it is more subtle than that. When THE DA VINCI CODE
was on Dan Brown's computer, as I am guessing it once was, it was
stored there as a string of ones and zeroes. If I could take
that string and find the decimal equivalent of that giant binary
number, I would have the entire contents of that novel encoded in
a single number. If I gave that number to you, it would not be
too difficult for you to write a computer program to take that
giant number and reconstitute Dan Brown's whole novel. So far
sharing that huge number is probably not illegal, but if you and
I actually did what I describe here the courts would probably
soon rule it so.
Now as to illegal primes: given an arbitrary binary string, would
it be possible to find a prime number that ends in that binary
string? I did not know if that was possible or not, but
apparently it is by Dirichlet's "Theorem On Primes in Arithmetic
Progression". This means that if there really is information
that is illegal to possess and share, the courts could
potentially rule that prime numbers that make that information
obtainable are illegal to have and hand out.
Well, the courts have in fact ruled that a particular prime
number is restricted because of information it contains. What
information? Apparently someone named Jon Lech Johansen wrote a
program that allowed PCs to circumvent copyright protecting
software on DVDs. The program was ruled illegal as much as
some hackers wanted to have it. So a mathematician named Phil
Carmody compressed the program and gzipped it. (If you don't
know what all that means, it just is a way to encode a program as
a somewhat smaller binary number. That I was willing to explain,
even if I won't explain primes.) He then found a prime number
that in binary ended in that string. Supposedly it was the tenth
largest prime number ever found. Whether he was open about it or
not, I do not know, but word got out that this prime number has
this really nice, useful, and totally illegal program embedded
inside it in a way that is not too difficult to decrypt. It
became a popular prime number.
The courts now had a choice. Nobody had ever thought that a
prime number should or could be made illegal, but now it appeared
that if all prime numbers were legal to have and to share,
there would no longer be any real privacy for any information.
People could take any information and find a prime number that
has that information encrypted in it. Anyone with sufficient
computing power could encode any information they wanted to into
a prime number and publish that number to the world. Their backs
against the wall, the courts set a weird precedent and ruled that
the possession and sharing of this particular prime number was
also a crime. I suppose the courts did not have much choice.
They probably did not have much fervor for the principle that new
discoveries in mathematics should be owned by everybody. Some
mathematical knowledge, in fact, could be dangerous in other
ways. Ask the people who worked on the Manhattan Project. So
the courts decided that this particular prime number was actually
restricted information and illegal to share. That does not stop
some people.
The story of the illegal prime number can be found at
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=illegal+prime. It also
flouts the law and prints the illegal prime number. Hence it
strikes a blow for mathematical freedom. Yeah, baby, yeah! All
power to primes! All primes to powers! [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Poor . . . Math (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In the New Yorker article on poverty, "Relatively Deprived" by
John Cassidy (04/03/06, available at
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060403fa_fact), there
are a couple of very questionable mathematical statements.
First, the author writes, "[Mollie] Orshansky used her food plans
to calculate a subsistence budget for families of various sizes.
For a mother and father with two children, she estimated the
expense of a "low cost" plan at $3.60 a day, and of an even more
frugal "economy plan" at $2.80 a day. Rather than trying to
calculate the price of other items in the family budget, such as
rent, heat, and clothing, Orshansky relied on a survey by the
Agriculture Department, which showed that the typical American
family spent about a third of its income on food. Thus, to
determine the minimum income a family needed in order to survive,
she simply multiplied the annual cost of the food plans by three.
Families on the low-cost plan needed to earn at least $3,955 a
year; families on the economy plan needed to earn $3,165."
Well, yes, the "typical" family spent a third of its income on
food. But on the one hand, since the very rich clearly spend a
lot less than a third, it follows that the very poor would spend
*more* than a third of their income on food. On the other hand,
if one is currently spending $2000 on food, one theoretically
therefore needs to earn $6000. But if one decreases the food
expenses to $1314 (or $1022), the other expenses would not
change, and hence one would need to earn $5314 (or $5022), not
the figures Orshansky gives. The first factor would push down
the "poverty level earnings figure"; the latter would push it up.
Whether the two factors cancel out is very questionable.
Then the author states, "In 2004, the most recent year for which
figures are available, it stood at 12.7 per cent, a slight
increase over the previous year, and in some regions the figure
is much higher. ... Daniel T. Slesnick calculated that the
"consumption poverty rate" for 1995--that is, the percentage of
families whose spending was less than the poverty income
threshold--was 9.5 per cent, which is 4.3 per cent less than the
official poverty rate." It looks as though Cassidy just
subtracted 4.3 from the figure for 1995 (which he does not even
give in the article). But 4.3% less than 12.7% is 12.15%. (If
you get half of something one year, and 20% less the next, you
get 40% of the total, not 30%.)
All of which goes to show that mathematics education seems to be
below the academic poverty level. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Question on MUNICH (film comment by Mark R. Leeper)
From my mailbox:
"I wasn't able to see "Munich" due to interruption of life here
in Southern Mississippi by Hurricane Katrina. We are still
recovering from *that*, but our Cinemark and Blockbusters are
back up once again. I am planning to rent the DVD when it is
available next month."
"Last week, I had lunch with a fellow who claims to have read a
review that said basically that the film is blatantly anti-
Semitic. Supposedly, all the Israelis/Jews in Munich are
portrayed as 'bad guys,' and the terrorists are portrayed as
'good guys.' Since I did not see the film, I could not comment,
but this seems, on the face of it, to be absurd."
"Since you HAVE seen the film, and are a professional reviewer, I
would appreciate your comments."
I might not be the best person to ask, because I consider myself
pro-Israel. Ironically that makes me more tolerant of the film,
not less. Israel's back is constantly against the wall and any
dirty fighting they do is more than counterbalanced by the dirty
fighting against Israel. This is a film that shows Mossad doing
what they can to defend their country but not always getting it
right. That may feed a cycle of violence, but the alternative is
surrender and that would lead to greater evil.
Steven Spielberg is certainly not anti-Jewish and I don't think
his film is either. MUNICH is at least in part a lament for the
collateral damage that occurs because Israel is doing what it has
to do to survive. In WWII when the Americans would shell the
Germans in a town, it is very likely that some innocent people
would unintentionally be killed. This inadvertent killing is
rarely acknowledged in film. If it was acknowledged I would just
consider the film more sophisticated, but I don't think I would
consider it anti-American.
(By the way I am not a professional reviewer. Film reviewing is
a hobby with me.) [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Harry Potter's Age (letter of comment by David Goldfarb)
In response to Evelyn's comments in the 04/14/06 issue of the MT
VOID about Harry Potter's age in the various books, David Goldfarb
writes, "You recall correctly that Harry is ten at the start of
book one, but we very quickly see him turn eleven, and he is
eleven for the greater part of the book. Thus in the latest book
he is sixteen, and you may recall mention that he is about to
reach is majority at seventeen." [-dg]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I wanted to read V FOR VENDETTA by Alan Moore and Judy Groves
(ISBN 0-930289-52-8) to compare it with the movie. But I found
it very difficult. Why? Well, although the font size is about
the same as most books, the vertical spacing is much tighter,
with almost twice as many lines per inch, and the font is an
irregular sans serif type, rather than a standard serif type. I
suspect it becomes harder to read as one's eyesight gets worse,
which may be one reason that graphic novels are more popular
among the young. (Similarly, magazines or web pages that use odd
color combinations, such as purple letters on a black background,
seem to be aimed at those with perfect eyesight.) I managed to
read about two-thirds of it, but it was too much eyestrain for me
to finish.
I cannot comment on the actual book of THE PERIODIC TABLE by
Michael Swanwick (ISBN 1-9046-1900-2), because I read it as
individual pieces on the scifiction site
(http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/periodictable.html).
Actually, I downloaded it a bit at a time to my palmtop, because
each of the pieces is just the right length to read while waiting
in a line or during other short periods. It consists of 118
pieces each "inspired" by an element on the periodic table. Some
are science fiction, some are fantasy, some are alternate
history. Some are humorous, some are serious. Some are based on
the name of the element, some are based on the characteristics of
the element itself, and some are fairly generic (e.g., someone is
mining for the element, but it could just as easily be another
element). For example, "Iridium" is about the iridium layer at
the end of the Cretaceous, while "Radium" is a reminiscence of
Pierre Curie, and "Radon" is about monsters in the basement.
While a few of them fall flat, on the whole Swanwick does an
excellent job. (And I am sure he is happy it is over!)
(After writing this, I noticed that it was mentioned in SciTech
Daily, http://scitechdaily.com/, so it may actually get an
actual printing in the United States, rather than just the current
British small-press edition.)
GOLEMS AMONG US by Bryon L. Sherwin (ISBN 1-56663-568-3) begins
with a discussion of the legend of the golem in Jewish mysticism,
and then proceeds to apply the theological and ethical
implications given by rabbis and scholars over the years to
modern questions of artificial intelligence, reproductive
technology, and corporations. Sherwin's coverage of the Golem
legend extends beyond that of the Golem of Prague (which turns
out to be a recent "invention"), and it is good to see an ethical
analysis of these modern issues that is not based on Protestant
fundamentalism or Roman Catholicism (or indeed on Christianity at
all). I recommend this as providing a counter-balance to what is
usually presented as "the" religious opinion of these issues.
[-ecl]
[For those unfamilar with golems, there is an article about them
at http://www.geocities.com/markleeper/golem.htm. Modesty
forbids me giving a fulsome but accurate recommendation of this
article. -mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
We can do anything we want to if we stick to it
long enough.
-- Helen Keller