The big confirmation in Faith was the line from the Hybrid: “The missing 3 will give you the 5 from the home of the 13th.” While there is still some potential in the minds of some viewers that the 13th will turn out to be something other than the “13th tribe” this seems to confirm what other clues have been saying for quite some time in the show: The Final Five are from Earth.

While this was not news to readers of this blog, I did find it a bit interesting that she referred to the “home of the 13th” because it remains my contention that there never was a 13th tribe. That “the 13th tribe” is really a mythologized name for the people of the homeworld, who never were a tribe, per se. But since the scrolls wish to hide the true story and the origin of the Kobolians, the authors gave them the name of a tribe and a story. And indeed, since the 12 tribes all have names from the Earth zodiac, and the supposed 13th tribe “left” for Earth 2,000 years before the exodus from Kobol, this makes a lot of sense. If the 13th tribe existed and had a name, it is not from the zodiac (No, Ophucious doesn’t count) and it’s really the first tribe. But you can’t call them that without leaking the truth.

However, the Hybrid’s use of “the 13th” suggests perhaps more reality for this tribe. It’s possible there was a tribe of Kobolians who did a return expedition to Earth, though I am not quite sure what that explains in the plot. We could have the Final Five being from Earth in several ways. They could have originated in a repopulated Earth, for example.

However, the plot that makes the most sense has the Final Five originating on the real Earth, some time in the not too distant future, and playing a part in the 3 cycles of human/AI war, exodus and resettlement.

In fact, while I did not suggest it seriously at first, I considered it a cute plot point to suggest the Final Five were in fact once ordinary humans who came of age in the late 20th century and then uploaded into machine form some time in the 21st. And as 20th century humans, they could have found that “All Along the Watchtower” was a favourite song of the group, and thus programmed it to be the “wakeup song” used when it is time to make sleeper copies of themselves, planted among the regular humans, become aware of what they are.

When Bear McCreary, music director for BSG was asked about this, he said that no, the song was not supposed to be the “real” AATW from Earth, it was just a song used in the show, which of course like all other songs in the show is from our real world. However, Ron Moore took a different take, saying the song is indeed intended to demonstrate a connection between the characters and the real Earth. If so, then my explanation of 20th century uploaded humans makes an interesting sort of sense.

We’ve also seen Starbuck was in an exploding viper, then taken to Earth in a new one, where she took pictures, and then returned to Galactica after receiving visions that turned out to be of the scene of the Cylon civil war. (I was pleased that the gas giant and triple star did not turn out to be Jupiter/Saturn and Alpha Centauri, because such choices made little scientific sense.)

With the Final Five being from Earth, and Starbuck taken to Earth, it implies that the Final Five, or their boss the Cylon god, are the ones who took Starbuck to Earth. (Not the Final 5 copies on board the fleet, of course, but other copies aware of who they are.)

And we have also learned how the 7 Cylons have programming about the Final Five — to not think of them — and that the raiders have programming to obey a command from the Final Five (Anders) to call off the attack. (Or possibly, but less likely, to call of the attack on any detection of any signal from a final five member.)

In other words, more and more confirmation that the Final Five, or their God, were the ones who programmed the 7 Cylons. The programming is so strong that the attempt to bypass it after the Raiders reported on the presence of an F5 member resulted in a massive and costly civil war. It’s serious stuff.

This clarifies a darker vision of the Final Five (and or their God) in playing out the cycle of history. They helped make and program the 7 Cylons. They built a temple 4,000 years ago that would trigger with a nova, and knew that long ago that the fleet would be doing an exodus through the area around that time.

This means that while they did not directly participate in the war, it came as no surprise to them. They were expecting it, depending on it in fact. They could have stopped it but wanted the master plan and cycle to go on as it has before. Indeed, it is hard now not to argue that when they/He provided programming to the 7 Cylons that this didn’t play some role in the attitudes they have that led to genocide. The F5 needed this to happen to complete the cycle. They seemed to put a bit of extra programming into Leoben as well, giving him his prophecies. And it seems they are the ones who put programming into Starbuck too.

Does that make Starbuck the final Cylon? I don’t think so, because I think all the colonial humans can receive some level of visions and programming from the Final Five. Roslin gets visions, Oracles get visions, Baltar gets visions and Starbuck gets visions — they can’t all be the final Cylon. Starbuck’s vision borders on a compulsion, and the only other compulsions we have seen (Tyroll to find the Temple, Boomer to shoot Adama, Baltar to hand over a nuke, somebody to poison the food supply) have applied only to Cylons (which I think Baltar is) but you can see the flaw here…

The Afterlife

The other curious and disturbing element from Faith was Roslin’s dream about a Styxian ferryboat to the afterlife. This is troublesome because Baltar is preaching of this river, and she gets the dream coincident with Kowalksi’s actual death, suggesting that it is, like many other dreams of hers, more than a dream.

On one hand, if the colonials are all artificial beings programmed to think they are human, as I do suspect, it makes perfect sense that those who created them would have set them to upload and live in a virtual-reality afterlife. It would be the only humane thing to do in creating such a race if you have that technology, and they clearly do. But having such an afterlife is just too sappy. It sucks all the dramatic darkness from the show. Many shows have characters who are certain of an afterlife, even provide dramatic evidence of it, but to actually show it? That would not be good. Talk about it is fine. But I am concerned that they show it with any hints of reality associated with it. We’ll see where this goes.

A recent story today about discussions for an official defense Botnet in the USA prompted me to post a question I’ve been asking for the last year. Are some of the world’s botnets secretly run by intelligence agencies, and if not, why not?

Some estimates suggest that up to 1/3 of PCs are secretly part of a botnet. The main use of botnets is sending spam, but they are also used for DDOS extortion attacks and presumably other nasty things like identity theft.

But consider this — having remote control of millions of PCs, and a large percentage of the world’s PCs seems like a very tempting target for the world’s various intelligence agencies. Most zombies are used for external purposes, but it would be easy to have them searching their own disk drives for interesting documents, and sniffing their own LANs for interesting unencrypted LAN traffic, or using their internal state to get past firewalls.

Considering the billions that spy agencies like the NSA, MI6, CSEC and others spend on getting a chance to sniff signals as they go over the wires, being able to look at the data all the time, any time as it sits on machines must be incredibly tempting.

And if the botnet lore is to be accepted, all this was done using the resources of a small group of young intrusion experts. If a group of near kids can control hundreds of millions of machines, should not security experts with billions of dollars be tempted to do it?

Of course there are legal/treaty issues. Most “free nation” spy agencies are prohibited from breaking into computers in their own countries without a warrant. (However, as we’ve seen, the NSA has recently been lifted of this restriction, and we’re suing over that.) However, they are not restricted on what they do to foreign computers, other than by the burdens of keeping up good relations with our allies.

However, in some cases the ECHELON loophole may be used, where the NSA spies on British computers and MI-6 spies on American computers in exchange.

More simply, these spy agencies would not want to get caught at this, so they would want to use young hackers building spam-networks as a front. They would be very careful to assure that the botting could not be traced back to them. To keep it legal, they might even just not take information from computers whose IP addresses or other clues suggest they are domestic. The criminal botnet operators could infect everywhere, but the spies would be more careful about where they got information and what they paid for.

Of course, spy agencies of many countries would suffer no such restrictions on domestic spying.

Of all the spy agencies in the world, can it be that none of them have thought of this? That none of them are tempted by being able to comb through a large fraction of the world’s disk drives, looking for both bad guys and doing plain old espionage?

That’s hard to fathom. The question is, how would we detect it? And if it’s true, could it mean that spies funded (as a cover story) the world’s spamming infrastructure?

Here’s my latest assembled panorama, of the main square of Munich, known as Marienplatz, taken from the St. Peter’s Church bell tower just to the south.

This is a 360 degree shot, taken just after sunset. This is a very technically difficult panorama, and as such not perfect. First of all, a tripod is not practical at the top of this tower, where the walkway is so narrow that it’s hard for two people to pass. It also has a metal grille with holes large enough for the camera but not much bigger. So we’re talking handheld long exposures.

And you must walk around the tower, which means parallax, so perfect joins are not possible. This effort has some distortions to get around that but does cover the entire city.

That’s the Rathaus (town hall) prominent in the center of the picture, and the Frauenkirche to the left of it, and the moon in the upper right.

It seems that half the programs I try and install under Windows want to have a “daemon” process with them, which is to say a portion of the program that is always running and which gets a little task-tray icon from which it can be controlled. Usually they want to also be run at boot time. In Windows parlance this is called a service.

There are too many of them, and they don’t all need to be there. Microsoft noticed this, and started having Windows detect if task tray icons were too static. If they are it hides them. This doesn’t work very well — they even hide their own icon for removing hardware, which of course is going to be static most of the time. And of course some programs now play games to make their icons appear non-static so they will stay visible. A pointless arms race.

All these daemons eat up memory, and some of them eat up CPU. They tend to slow the boot of the machine too. And usually to do much — mostly to wait for some event, like being clicked, or hardware being plugged in, or an OS/internet event. And the worst of them on their menu don’t even have a way to shut them down.

I would like to see the creation of a master deaemon/service program. This program would be running all the time, and it would provide a basic scripting language to perform daemon functions. Programs that just need a simple daemon, with a menu or waiting for events, would be strongly encouraged to prepare it in this scripting language, and install it through the master daemon. That way they take up a few kilobytes, not megabytes, and don’t take long to load. The scripting language should be able to react at least in a basic way to all the OS hooks, events and callbacks. It need not do much with them — mainly it would run a real module of the program that would have had a daemon. If the events are fast and furious and don’t pause, this program could stay resident and become a real daemon.

But having a stand alone program would be discouraged, certainly for boring purposes like checking for updates, overseeing other programs and waiting for events. The master program itself could get regular updates, as features are added to it as needed by would-be daemons.

Unix started with this philosophy. Most internet servers are started up by inetd, which listens on all the server ports you tell it, and fires up a server if somebody tries to connect. Only programs with very frequent requests, like E-mail and web serving, are supposed to keep something constantly running.

The problem is, every software package is convinced it’s the most important program on the system, and that the user mostly runs nothing but that program. So they act like they own the place. We need a way to only let them do that if they truly need it.

I learned today that there is an exhibit about my father in the famous creation museum near Cincinnati. This museum is a multi-million dollar project set up by creationists as a pro-bible “natural history” museum that shows dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and how the flood carved the Grand Canyon and much more. It’s all completely bullocks and a number of satirical articles about it have been written, including the account by SF writer John Scalzi.

While almost all this museum is about desperate attempts to make the creation story sound like natural history, it also has the “Biblical Authority Room.” This room features my father, Charles Templeton in two sections. It begins with this display on bible enemies which tells the story of how he went to Princeton seminary and lost his faith. (Warning: Too much education will kill your religion.)

However, around the corner is an amazing giant alcove. It shows a large mural of photos and news stories about my father as a preacher and later. On the next wall is an image of a man (clearly meant to be him though the museum denied it) digging a grave with the tombstone “God is Dead.” There are various other tombstones around for “Truth,” “God’s Word” and “Genesis.” There is also another image of the mural showing it a bit more fully.

Next to the painting is a small brick alcove which for the life of me looks like a shrine.

In it is a copy of his book Farewell to God along with a metal plaque with a quote from the book about how reality is inconsistent with the creation story. (You can click on the photo, courtesy Andrew Arensburger, to see a larger size and read the inscription.)

I had heard about this museum for some time, and even contemplated visiting it the next time I was in the area, though part of me doesn’t want to give them $20. However now I have to go. But I remain perplexed that he gets such a large exibit, along with the likes of Darwin, Scopes and Luther. Today, after all, only older people know of his religious career, though at his peak he was one of the most well known figures of the field. He and his best friend, Billy Graham, were taking the evangelism world by storm, and until he pulled out, many people would have bet that he, rather than Graham, would become the great star. You can read his memoir here online.

But again, this is all long ago, and a career long left behind. But there may be an explanation, based on what he told me when he was alive.

Among many fundamentalists, there is a doctrine of “Once Saved, Always Saved.” What this means is that once Jesus has entered you and become your personal saviour, he would never, ever desert you. It is impossible for somebody who was saved to fall. This makes apostacy a dreadful sin for it creates a giant contradiction. For many, the only way to reconcile this is to decide that he never was truly saved after all. That it was all fake. Only somebody who never really believed could fall.

Except that’s not the case here. He had the classic “religious experience” conversion, as detailed in his memoir. He was fully taken up with it. And more to the point, unlike most, when much later he truly came to have doubts, he debated them openly with his friends, like Graham. And finally decided that he couldn’t preach any more after decades of doing so, giving up fame and a successful career with no new prospects. He couldn’t do it because he could not feel honest preaching to people when he had become less sure himself. Not the act of somebody who was faking it all along.

However, this exhibit in the museum doesn’t try to paint it that way. Rather, it seems to be a warning that too much education by godless scientists can hurt your faith.

So there may be a second explanation. As a big-time preacher, with revival meetings filling sporting arenas, my father converted a lot of people to Christianity. He was one of the founders of Youth for Christ International, which is today still a major religious organization. I meet these converts from time to time. I can see how, if you came to your conversion through him, my father’s renunciation of it must be very hurtful — especially when combined with the once-saved-always-saved doctrine. So I have to wonder if somebody at the Creation Museum isn’t one of his converts, and thus wanted to tell the story of a man that many of the visitors to the museum will have forgotten.

Here are some other Charles Templeton links on my site:

• Home Page
• Jesus, a bible in modern English
• Anecdotal Memoir

Right now I’m in the process of scanning some of his books and will post when I have done this.

I’m scanning my documents on an ADF document scanner now, and it’s largely pretty impressive, but I’m surprised at some things the system won’t do.

Double page feeding is the bane of document scanning. To prevent it, many scanners offer methods of double feed detection, including ultrasonic detection of double thickness and detection when one page is suddenly longer than all the others (because it’s really two.)

There are a number of other tricks they could do, I think. I think a paper feeder that used air suction or gecko-foot van-der-waals force pluckers on both sides of a page to try to pull the sides in two different directions could help not just detect, but eliminate such feeds.

However, the most the double feed detectors do is signal an exception to stop the scan. Which means work re-feeding and a need to stand by.

However, many documents have page numbers. And we’re going to OCR them and the OCR engine is pretty good at detecting page numbers (mostly out of desire to remove them.) However, it seems to me a good approach would be to look for gaps in the page numbers, especially combined with the other results of a double feed. Then don’t stop the scan, just keep going, and report to the operator which pages need to be scanned again. Those would be scanned, their number extracted, and they would be inserted in the right place in the final document.

Of course, it’s not perfect. Sometimes page numbers are not put on blank pages, and some documents number only within chapters. So you might not catch everything, but you could catch a lot of stuff. Operators could quickly discern the page numbering scheme (though I think the OCR could do this too) to guide the effort.

I’m seeking a maximum convenience workflow. I think to do that the best plan is to have several scanners going, and the OCR after the fact in the background. That way there’s always something for the operator to do — fixing bad feeds, loading new documents, naming them — for maximum throughput. Though I also would hope the OCR software could do better at naming the documents for you, or at least suggesting names. Perhaps it can, the manual for Omnipage is pretty sparse.

While some higher end scanners do have the scanner figure out the size of the page (at least the length) I am not sure why it isn’t a trivial feature for all ADF scanners to do this. My $100 Strobe sheetfed scanner does it. That my $6,000 (retail) FI-5650 needs extra software seems odd to me.

PCs can go into standby mode (just enough power to preserve the RAM and do wake-on-lan) and into hibernate mode (where they write out the RAM to disk, shut down entirely and restore from disk later) as well as fully shut down.

Standby mode comes back up very fast, and should be routinely used on desktops. In fact, non-server PCs should consider doing it as a sort of screen saver since the restart can be so quick. It’s also popular on laptops but does drain the battery in a few days keeping the RAM alive. Many laptops will wake up briefly to hibernate if left in standby so long that the battery gets low, which is good.

How about this option: Write the ram contents out to disk, but also keep the ram alive. When the user wants to restart, they can restart instantly, unless something happened to the ram. If there was a power flicker or other trouble, notice the ram is bad and restart from disk. Usually you don’t care too much about the extra time needed to write out to disk when suspending, other than for psychological reasons where you want to be really sure the computer is off before leaving it. It’s when you come back to the computer that you want instant-on.

In fact, since RAM doesn’t actually fail all that quickly, you might even find you can restore from RAM after a brief power flicker. In that case, you would want to store a checksum for all blocks of RAM, and restore any from disk that don’t match the checksum.

To go further, one could also hibernate to newer generations of fast flash memory. Flash memory is getting quite cheap, and while older generations aren’t that quick, they seek instantaneously. This allows you to reboot a machine with its memory “paged out” to flash, and swap in pages at random as they are needed. This would allow a special sort of hybrid restore:

1. Predict in advance which pages are highly used, and which are enough to get the most basic functions of the OS up. Write them out to a special contiguous block of hibernation disk. Then write out the rest, to disk and flash.
2. When turning on again, read this block of contiguous disk and go “live.” Any pages needed can then be paged in from the flash memory as needed, or if the flash wasn’t big enough, unlikely pages can come from disk.
3. In the background, restore the rest of the pages from the faster disk. Eventually you are fully back to ram.

This would allow users to get a fairly fast restore, even from full-off hibernation. If they click on a rarely used program that was in ram, it might be slow as stuff pages in, but still not as bad as waiting for the whole restore.

I must admit I’ve been somewhat disappointed with how sparse the clues have been this season on the show’s central mysteries. Several episodes in, and we don’t know a great deal more than the little we learned in the first episode. However, something shown in the “scenes from next week” bodes for more interesting times.

If you don’t watch that preview, you might want to hold on this post until Friday.  read more »

I’ve been ranting of late about the dangers inherent in “Data Portability” which I would like to rename as BEPSI to avoid the motherhood word “portability” for something that really has a strong dark side as well as its light side.

But it’s also important to come up with an alternative. I think the best alternative may lie in what I would call “data hosting.” It’s a layered system, with a data layer and an application layer on top.

A data hosting approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. (You might have that server right in your own house, or pay for hosting services.) If you pay, that server’s duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That’s what you’re paying for. You can have more than one (with different personas, if you like) but for now let’s imagine having just one.

Your data host’s job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

As such, you don’t join a site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Rather, companies like those build applications which can run on your data. They don’t get the data, rather they write code to do things with it that runs in a protected sandbox on your data host.  read more »

As I’ve often discussed, many clues show the Final Five to be over 4,000 years old. We see them in hooded robes in the 2,000 year old Kobol Opera House in visions, and they are almost surely the 5 priests who built the “Temple of Five” 4,000 years ago on the way from Earth.

But we also see that 4 copies of the Final Five have been present in the Colonies for a long time. Tigh is 60 years old, the others look to be in their 30s. And they have aged and gotten sick and been totally human. Indeed, until recently they had no idea they weren’t. As yet there are still few clues as to why the Final Five might be living with the colonials as sleepers.

But here’s the interesting question: What have then been doing the last 4,000 years? They had some role in the creation of the new generation of Cylons, who got programmed to know of the Final Five but to avoid thinking about them. Perhaps they’ve been living out in space until this set of 5 sleepers was introduced into colonial life, destined to be among the fleet that flees the coming human/Cylon war (the third such war, at least, if I read things correctly.)

But more likely they have been living in the colonies for the past 2,000 years. If so, have they been living in the same bodies, perhaps growing old and then downloading into a new young body when done with the old? This could be pulled off — “Boy, you sure look a lot like your dad!” — especially if you moved around from colony to colony, though I can certainly see some risks in a society with thousands of years of photography and computers. Of course the Final Five would have no problem manipulating colonial computers.

Another option might include taking different bodies with each incarnation. And quite possibly starting each new incarnation as a baby, as a sleeper, then growing up and learning of your nature when some trigger happens.

This has led to speculation in my thread about Joesph Adama that he could have been another member of the final Five (presumably the missing one) and also be a current character. A different current character. Perhaps his grandson, Lee. Or perhaps Romo Lampkin, the lawyer who says he knew Joseph well. For those in the “it’s somebody not in the Last Supper photo” camp, this makes some sense and provides the needed “oh shit” moment when all is revealed.

This also allows other members of the Final Five to have had earlier incarnations with roles in colonial history. In particular, one wonders if members of the Final Five, in other bodies, may be some of the characters in Caprica the new Prequel series being made. That includes Joseph Adama, but also the mysterious monotheist preist, Sister Clarice who we are told plays such a pivotal role in the creation of the Cylons.

And of course, who were the final Five at the fall of Kobol? Where they Lords of Kobol, or their enemies? And did they look like Tigh, Foster, Anders and Tyrol?

Been getting a bunch of calls from reporters this weekend. Our good friend spam turns 30 in a couple of days, and a few years ago I did some research and became an authority on the history of the term and the phenomenon. Since everybody else is doing it, I though I should point to my various articles on the history of spam, as well as some updates I just wrote for the 30th.

• How the word “spam” came to mean Junk E-mail.
• The first spam, from May 1978 and the reaction to it. Look in particular for Richard Stallman’s defence of spam.
• Reflections back on the 25th anniversary along with new thoughts on the 30th.
• My collection of spam essays including my best plans to defeat spam.

If you’ve seen all this before, you can mostly focus on the new thoughts where I talk about the rise of Botnets — which may negate many of the best anti-spam solutions, and the flight to Facebook from e-mail by the younger generation.

Update: I’ve done a bunch of press interviews on spam this week, and was on May 3’s “Weekend All Things Considered” on NPR as well. I get in quite a few words, especially for radio.

Spam Filters and the degradation of e-Mail.

And now this new thought. Spam filters are working better, but content filtering means false positives. Curiously, this has brought an unreliability to e-mail which parallels the famous (but mostly false) unreliability of the postal service.

In the old days, the widespread belief in the poor quality of the postal service was a popular excuse. You could always tell somebody you hadn’t received his letter, or that it had been very slow in arriving, or that you had sent your letter but it must have gotten lost or delayed. And people would either believe it, or feel they had to pretend to believe it. We dubbed the system “snail mail” to reiterate this, and of course “The Cheque is in the Mail” became known as one of the 3 great lies.

For a while e-mail was good enough that you couldn’t use this lie so easily. And it was too fast, as well. The only question was when you would get around to reading your mail.

But now we’ve got a new excuse — your mail got trashed by my spam filters. Oh, wait, I found it, in my spam folder. A nice and convenient lie that the other party can’t quite call you out on. Likewise, now, when I send a mail and don’t hear back, I always have to wonder if the mail has been caught in the filters.

(More often than not, non-response is due to another e-mail phenomenon: the growing stack. If I can’t answer your mail right away there is a danger it will move down the stack in my e-mail box, and soon be lost to attention, even though it’s there and I read it.)

Forces in BSG are being driven by offstage powers but I must admit “there’s too much confusion” over their agenda right now, especially concerning Starbuck.

Starbuck is teleported to Earth and back, in a new viper, and she doesn’t really remember it well. In the viper are photos she took and little else. She describes some sights (and paints them in a mural) on the way back from Earth, the comet, ringed-planet and flashing triple star. They seem to be clues about the way to Earth.

But why such strange clues? If they just wanted to let Starbuck guide the fleet to Earth, they could have just given her coordinates. Or, while she was at Earth, she could have photographed a number of useful stellar signposts which would allow any trained interstellar navigator (which Starbuck is) to find it again. Great things to notice are the disk of the galaxy, close galaxies like Andromeda and the Magellanic clouds and prominent star clusters and nebulae like the Pleiades, M8/Lagoon and M13. And bright stars like Deneb and Antares can be seen for 20,000 light years. Getting a spectrograph on any bright stars would identify them and quickly position Earth.

Now to a good computer, the Zodiac will do the job once within a few hundred light years. You just have to search the stars you can see to find one that has the Zodiac pattern in its sky. The other sky-marks are for finding the area from further away.

Instead they give her these visions, which may be all in the same system. Ringed gas giants are everywhere, as are comets. Flashing triples are not common. It is not likely this is Alpha Centauri — and besides, get close enough to see that and the Zodiac takes you home anyway.

So why cryptic clues? Why a new viper, sure to make them distrust her, when powers like that could surely provide an old one too.  read more »

I’ve spoken about the Web 2.0 movement that is now calling itself “data portability.” Now there are web sites, and format specifications and plans are underway to make it possible to quickly export the personal data you put on one social networking site to another. While that sounds like a good thing — we like interoperability, and cooperation, and low barriers to entry on new players — I sometimes seem like a lone voice warning about some of the negative consequences of this.

I know I’m not going to actually stop the data portability movement, and nor is that really my goal. But I do have a challenge for it: Switch to a slightly negative name. Data portability sounds like motherhood, and this is definitely not a motherhood issue. Deliberately choosing a name that includes the negative connotations would make people stop and think as they implement such systems. It would remind them, every step of the way, to consider the privacy implications. It would cause people asking about the systems to query what they have done about the downsides.

And that’s good, because otherwise it’s easy to put on a pure engineering mindset and say, “what’s the easiest way we can build the tools to make this happen?” rather than “what’s a slightly harder way that mitigates some of the downsides?”

A name I dreamed up is BEPSI, standing for Bulk Export of Personal and Sensitive Information. This is just as descriptive, but reminds you that you’re playing with information that has consequences. Other possible names include EBEPSI (Easy Bulk Export…) or OBEPSI (One-click Bulk Export…) which sounds even scarier.

It’s rare for people to do something so balanced, though. Nobody likes to be reminded there could be problems with what they’re doing. They want a name that sounds happy and good, so they can feel happy and good. And I know the creator of dataportability.org thinks he’s got a perfectly good name already so there will be opposition. But a name like this, or another similar one, would be the right thing to do. Remind people of the paradoxes with every step they take.

Ok, this would be a cool application for iPhones, Pocket PC and the like — a dialer which presents an old style rotary phone dial, and you have to put your finger in it and spin it around the center, and then it slowly twists back and plays the sound of a dial returning. A bit like how you control an iPod, but slower.

Completely useless, other than for having fun and explaining to kids why we call it “dialing” a phone.

Perhaps with the iPhone accelerometer you could actually spin the physical iPhone to move the dial. No way to generate the classic sore index finger and physical resistance though.

(Some people made jokes about rotary dial on the iPhone before it was launched but I don’t know of anybody who actually did this.)

The nature of the final five is going to be perhaps the central theme of this final season. Perhaps the most interesting thing we’ve learned is that the 7 Cylons are “programmed not to think of them.” This has been hinted at before, but it’s become much more dramatic of late.

Curiously, we have the 6s, 8s and 2s (Leobens) seemingly breaking the programming, following in the footsteps of #3 who was boxed for it. They are willing to kill their compatriots to break it. And the 1-4-5-Boomer alliance is willing to permanently kill the others to stop it. I’ve always suspected that Cavil (now revealed as #1) has some special knowledge. He’s the least religious, but the most willing to take drastic steps to avoid investigation of the final 5. Perhaps he isn’t blocked at all, but working for them?

It is now even clearer the special position the final 5 have. That they came first (they seem 4,000 years old, after all) and had a role in the programming of the other 7, including the placement of this compulsion not to think about them. (If not them, the god they worship did this.)

But entirely unclear is why at least 4 of the 5 placed themselves with the fleet as unaware sleepers, and why they were programmed to get a Dylan-based wakeup call at the Ionian nebula on the way to Earth that told them nothing else. Whatever their mission, it’s harder to fathom why it is better done by agents unaware of what they are. This suggest to me the religious concept of “incarnation.” Advanced beings perhaps feel out of touch with the lesser beings they are shepherding. Perhaps they only way to truly understand the humans is to occasionally become them.

Meanwhile, I suspect there are other copies of the final 5 which are fully aware. In fact, I think the 5 robed figures we see in the visions of the Kobol opera house are not simply visions or recordings, but real, aware copies of the 5. When #3 activated the Temple of Five, she seemed to think she was facing real beings. She felt moved to talk to them, apologize to them. Possibly a good recording but I suspect more.

Tory also presents something interesting. One week, she’s shagging Baltar to see what he knows, and cries because it sickens her. Next week, she’s in the airlock, calmly tricking Cally, and then spacing her with an emotionless face — even enjoying it. She talks about being drunk with excitement at her new self-knowledge, but it seemed odd to me how emotionless she was at Cally’s murder. One can understand how she concluded that she had no other choice but to kill Cally, who would have unmasked them all, ending or rewriting their lives, but it doesn’t make that much sense that she did not find it a regrettable killing, after declaring how she wasn’t evil, wasn’t less human. Why wasn’t she also crying while carrying out the murder?

Both she and Tyrol seem to have picked up some Cylon powers. She knocks Cally several feet with a casual backhand. Tyrol is not much hurt by being bashed in the face with a large wrench — and of course he handled being spaced much better than Cally not too long ago, one of the clues to us that he was a Cylon. But they never had super strength before, so it may be something that kicked in when the Cylon part of herself realized it was needed to preserve their secret.

There’s not much clear about where the Cylon civil war is going. It has been suggested that former enemies will join together, which implies to me that an alliance between the colonials and at least some of the Cylons is coming, possibly fighting other Cylons. Now the raiders and centurions, with free will and mind restored, also enter into that mix. Could we see another slave uprising on the part of the centurions as another repeat of the man/machine war cycle?

With sadness I must report the passing of William C. Tate, my stepfather, on Thursday. Bill and my mother met and fell in love when I was a young teenager. He was a neighbour, and I had met him, and even stayed over at his house with his son before they would meet, which is a bit unusual. He was kind and generous and supported her and our family for many decades. While he died from cancer, it came upon him quite suddenly and he was fortunately strong until near the end.

Bill was a leader in Toronto’s business community. He started out in the finance dept. of the small Canadian office of Garret Corporation, a major aerospace manufacturer. Quickly he was put in charge, and built it up to a 1,400 person operation making a variety of important components for civil and military aircraft.

I have created a site with a slight longer obituary and a link to a comment/guestbook thread on this blog. Visit the Bill Tate memorial at wctate.com or the guestbook page.

Bill Tate died April 10, 2008 after a mercifully short battle with Cancer.

A memorial service will take place Tuesday April 15 at noon at Turner & Porter Peel Chapel, 2180 Hurontario St. near Queensway in Mississauga. Friends, colleagues and the Garrett community are welcome.

An obituary can be found at the W.C. Tate memorial page

Also please leave your thoughts and memories in the comments below.

Starbuck comes back from Earth and declares it has a “yellow moon and star” which “matches the description in Pythia.” And we also see a a photo of Earth she took where we see a slightly yellowish moon over a gray Earth. Even more curiously, if you have an astronomical background, you will notice that the image of the moon comes from a partial lunar eclipse, which would make the moon yellow-orange but would only be temporary.

Of course, this makes no sense. Why would Pythia (who wrote the mythologized story of Earth) have described the moon as yellow? Some suggest this is just a flub of a line, and Starbuck or Sackhoff meant to say “yellow star and moon.” Our star is not really yellow to the naked or neutrally filtered eye, that is its colour in the stellar spectrum. And why the eclipse? These happen from time to time but are very short. It would be no accident to encounter one.

Starbuck then recounts a “ringed gas giant, a flashing triple star and a comet.” From Earth her naked eye would not see the rings of Saturn, though a hypothetical viper telescope could. Nothing would see a “flashing triple star.” While Alpha Centauri is a triple, it is not flashing, and the 3rd component is so dim that even people living near the primary would not see it naked eye. These read to me as “signposts” she was shown by the beings who took her on her Earth junket. I suspect the fleet will eventually see this flashing triple and take it as a sign they are on Starbuck’s course. Whether they trust that course is another matter.  read more »

Ok, admit it, who likes blogging in to a vacuum. You want to know how many people are actually reading your blog.

I have created a simple Perl script that scans your blog’s log file and attempts to calculate how many people read the blog and the RSS feeds.

You can download the feed reader script. I release it under GPL2.

It’s a perl script, so you would go to your web server log in the shell, and type “perl feedreaders.pl logfilename” or if you like just “tail -99999 blogfilename | perl feedreaders.pl -” because you only need to scan a couple of days worth of logs to get the figures.

Here are some notes:

• I take advantage of the fact that most blog aggregators now report how many people they are aggregating for. There is no standard but I have put in code to match the common patterns.
• I identify common RSS feed URLs, as well as the most common “main feed” names. If you have other feeds that it doesn’t pick up on, it’s easy to add them to the list at the start of the program.
• A reader has to fetch the feed or home page multiple times from the same IP to count
• On the other hand, people who change IPs regularly will count multiple times. People behind caches may count just once all together.
• I try to eliminate fetches from the most common non-RSS-aggregating spiders
• Based on my experiences, Google Reader and Bloglines are the most popular aggregators, then NewsGator.
• At least one aggregator identifies as Mozilla, custom code tags it.
• It also counts people who fetch your non-RSS blog page multiple times as readers.
• Programs that don’t say they handle multiple users get grouped among the singles.
• Programs with only a few fetches are not counted

I invite my 1146 main blog readers to give it a whirl. (The 53 readers of the new Battlestar blog feed won’t see this notice, nor the 72 reading the comments.

The original Cylons (the 7 humanoids and the metallic ones) defined the concept of Cylon in this version of BSG. Now the writers called them the Significant 7 or S7. Now the audience is more introduced to the concept of the “Final 5” Cylons. Because they are both called Cylons, I often see people confusing the two, and making some very wrong assumptions about the final 5. These are two very different types of Cylon, with two very different agendas. More different than any two factions of humanity in history, so it’s hard to get a grasp of it.

Let’s look at some comparisons to clarify this:

• The S7 engaged in a genocidal war against the colonies. The F5 fought for the colonial side. They played no visible part in planning or executing the Cylon attack.
• The S7 have many copies. For the F5, we’ve only seen one, and perhaps another in white robes in a projection of the Kobol opera house.
• The S7 seem fixed in age, and come out of the tank that way. The F5 age like humans.
• The S7 were the occupiers on New Caprica. The F5 were the leaders of the resistance.
• The S7 are super-strong and super robust. The F5 are perhaps slightly above average and not super strong until activated. (Tyrol was able to handle vacuum much better than Cally.)
• The S7 infiltrated the colonies 2 years before the war. The F5 were there at least 40 years, probably much longer
• The S7 are the result of experiments the metal Cylons did after the war. The F5 built the “Temple of 5” while on a trip from Earth, 4,000 years ago.
• Just to make that clear. The S7 are a few decades old. The F5 are several thousand years old, and associated with Earth
• The S7 fear Kobol. The F5 choose to appear in the Kobol opera house setting, destroyed 2,000 years ago.
• The S7 have built in programming commanding them not to think about the F5; trying to get past it got #3 boxed. We don’t know much about the F5’s programming, other than 4 were planted as sleepers, set to “wake up” at the Ionian nebula.
• The Centurions will obey and not shoot at S7 members. Before activation, they would attack F5 members. After activation, this appears to have changed.
• The S7 can’t breed with one another and have a very hard time breeding with humans. Tyrol of the F5 seemed to have little trouble breeding. We don’t know if Tigh tried or not.
• The S7 planted copies all over the colonies. We only see one of each F5 planted, but 3 (possibly 4) were arranged to be on or near Galactica at the start of the war, one as XO. The 4th made it through remarkable odds, and we don’t yet know how the 5th got there. The F5 were clearly very interested in Galactica and Adama.
• The S7 worship their god from afar, and Cavil is even doubtful. The F5 appear to have been the 5 priests of some god which seems likely to have been the Cylon god.
• When the Raiders learn the F5 are with the fleet, they immediately back off. Some of the S7 don’t believe the raiders. They were not able to detect this before activation, though.

This show has a cycle. All this has happened before and will happen again. There have been several cycles of creation of Cylons and war with them. The S7 are from the latest cycle, or believe themselves to be. The F5 are from some earlier cycle, possibly going back to the very first cycle.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the F5. We don’t know what their agenda is. We don’t know their relationship to the Cylon god. We don’t know why they were planted as sleeper agents, set to wake up at the Ionian nebula, and planted as much as 60 years ago. We don’t know if there are other copies, sleeper or non-sleeper out there, at different apparent ages. We don’t know how, when or why they implanted themselves in colonial society, but since they age and can have children, they have probably been there since the exodus from Kobol. We don’t know if they took the same form each generation or not. We don’t know how or why they (or somebody related to them) programmed the S7 not to think about them, while still knowing they exist at some level.

We can guess a few things:

• They probably knew about the war, even if not planning it, and probably allowed it to happen. Their plan involves taking the colonials to the Ionian nebula, and beyond, after all.
• They probably snuck the knowledge of their biotechnology to the metal cylons to help them create the S7, and got to control their programming at that time. This explains why the S7 are not very good at their biotech, and can’t breed themselves even though they can grow themselves in tanks. (Hint: starting from a human template, which one is easier?)
• They probably come from Earth, since the Temple of Five, in which they appear, is said to have been built by the mythical 13th tribe of Earthlings.
• They are the disciples of some godlike figure, the god whose name must not be spoken in the temple of five. This is almost surely the Cylon god, who put a message in the babble of the Hybrid that Baltar decoded as meaning to go to the Algae Planet.
• They like Bob Dylan. :-)
• They make be interested in the Adamas because Joseph Adama, father of Bill, was an opponent of the Graystones and their plan to build a slave race. (That’s in the upcoming prequel series, “Caprica”)
• Even before full activation, they had some compulsions, like Tyrol’s quest to seek the Temple of 5 and his refusal to destroy it when ordered.

They have entirely different agendas. While Tigh had a daydream about shooting Adama, truth is, there is no reason an F5 member would want to kill Adama. If one group is controlling the other, it’s the F5 who are manipulating the S7.

So if you hear the word Cylon, be sure to realize that there are at least 2 very different types, and you can’t assume almost anything you learned about one type is true of the other.