Robert Morris, RIP

Noted via Hacker News, an obituary of Robert Morris. One of the HN commenters quotes

Never underestimate the attention, risk, money and time that an opponent will put into reading traffic.
Rule 1 of cryptanalysis: check for plaintext.
The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it.
--Robert Morris

 

Recent Lessons on Databases

To the technically indoctrinated,

1. It is an important and elegant feature of relations that the tuples within them have not top-to-bottom ordering. This is because tuples are mathematical sets, and sets have no order. It is from relations that relational databases take their name; the tables and views within a relational database are just special cases of relations.
2. Concatenating a number and a string of characters produces a string of characters. This resulting string supports the operations valid for strings, not for numbers. If one is to sort it, one will sort it in lexicographic order and "101 Dalmatians" will always precede "3 Musketeers" in a non-decreasing sort.
3. In fact, distinguishing the "101" and the "3"  within their strings violates "First Normal Form", according to which the attributes of a tuple must be atomic.

For points 1 and 3, see any good introduction to relational databases, for example C.J. Date's Introduction to Database Systems.

To those not technically indoctrinated,

1.  If I didn't want it in order, why would I have ordered it before I gave it to you?
2. Of course 3 is less than 101.
3. First Normal Form?

I must say that Microsoft has learned about point 2, I'd bet through hard experience; if you have MP3s of "12 Days of Christmas" , "100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" , and "4 Green Fields" in a directory, Windows Explorer will display them in numeric order when it orders by name.

I must also say, as the technically indoctrinated one in this particular back-and-forth, I was grateful to the other party for her independently deciding to zero-pad the numbers of items, which resolved the problem.

John Jay Chapman

 A dozen years ago the University of Illinois Press published a selection of his writings, Unbought Spirit, which is remarkably hard to find, the Gutenberg Project makes his Emerson and Other Essays available for free download, and The Strand in New York usually seems to have a couple of copies of a selection from the 1960s. Chapman is worth the trouble of looking up, and I wish that Illinois had not put the book out of print. He is best on New England, education, literature, and politics, the topics of course tending to overlap.

In his essay on Julia Ward Howe he speaks of Boston clannishness at greater length than I will quote here, save, near the end

If you know the town well, you will find persons there who are not of the caste. Their countenances do not fall at the mention of Moses and Aaron, and they wear no phylacteries. You will generally find that such people are mere sojourners in Boston; their fathers and grandfathers came from elsewhere.

Unbought Spirit collects four essays on education, all worth reading: "Learning", "The Function of the University", "Professorial Ethics", and "The Pleasures of Greek".All could be quoted at length, but here is the end of  paragraph, no more striking than several others, from "Learning" (1910):

It has thus come about in America that our universities are beginning to be run as business colleges. They advertise, they compete with each other, the pretend to give good value to their customers. They desire to increase their trade, they offer social advantages and business openings to their patrons. In some cases they boldly conduct intelligence offices, and guarantee that no hard work done by the student shall be done in vain: a record of work is kept during the student's college life and the college undertakes to furnish him at any time thereafter with references and a character which shall help him in the struggle for life.

Chapman shows to advantage as a critic in his essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, collected in Emerson and Other Essays. Ford Maddox Ford and others complained about Stevenson's style, but I never quite got their point.Chapman make his very clear:

To a boy, the great artists of the world are a lot of necromancers, whose enchantments can perhaps be stolen and used again. To a man, they are a lot of human beings, and their works are parts of them. Their works are their hands and their feet, their organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions. To a man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imitate the manner of Dr. Johnson in eating. But Stevenson was not a man, he was a boy; or, to speak more accurately, the attitude of his mind towards his work remained unaltered from boyhood till death, though his practice and experiment gave him, as he grew older, a greater mastery over his materials. It is in this attitude of Stevenson's mind toward his own
work that we must search for the heart of his mystery.

Chapman was born to politics in a sense; his grandmother was an assistant of William Lloyd Garrison's. He was a reformer in a day when the breed was not much respected by either party. Any of the essays "Between Elections", "The Unity of Human Nature", "The Doctrine of Nonresistance", or for that matter long stretches of his essay on Emerson make good introductions.I'll end with a quotation from essay called "Politics" (1898):

The situation as it existed was made to the hand of trade. Political power had by the war been condensed and packed for delivery; and in the natural course of things the political trademarks began to find their way into the coffers of the capitalist The change of motive power behind the party organizations--from principles, to money--was silently effected during the thirty years which followed the war. Like all organic changes, it was unconscious. It was understood by no one.

Personal Brands

All credit to Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, who has dealt with the expression "personal brand" as it deserves. I don't know when the story will go behind a paywall, but for now you can see it here.

1859

Damien Searls, editor of the NYRB edition of The Journal 1837-1861 remarks that he

condensed the thirty-nine pages on John Brown (October 19-22, 1859) into a few of the most powerful lines, then kept Thoreau's references to Brown in later entries, to suggest the depth of his engagement.

 The references are all laudatory. His reference to a militia muster some weeks before, on September 8, was anything but. Yet what were Massachusetts's well-equipped regiments worth to the Union government a year and a half later? A great deal, I should say.

Beach Reading

I picked it up, anyway, in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, and read some pages of it on Spring Lake's beach: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War by Edmund Wilson. I have looked so far at what is familiar to me or interesting. As far as the familiar goes, Wilson's remarks on Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman seem just; his Lee and Holmes sound like the Lee and Holmes I've read of in passing.

Among the unfamiliar, I'd be interested to read some of Mary Chesnut, Albion Tourgee, and George Cable. I'd be particularly interested to read Francis Grierson's The Valley of Shadows, and perhaps excerpts from Frederick Law Olmsted's The Cotton Kingdom. I doubt I'll undertake the 1400 pages of Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States; and likely enough Patriotic War and I will part ways before I've read every one of its 800 pages. Mostly likely the details of Wilson's judgments on H.B. Stowe and Sidney Lanier will escape me.

Wilson published the book in 1962, during the centennial of the Civil War, which he called "this absurd centennial--a day of mourning would be more appropriate".

A Three-Language Day

• In the morning, cleanup of some old PL/Sql code that I neglected to fix months ago.
• Ongoing, testing and modification of some Python to rewrite DXF (CAD interchange) files of floor plans to label offices with their occupants.
• In the afternoon, some work with T-SQL first to encapsulate some SQL I don't want to have to rewrite time and again, second to debug somebody else's that was giving a wrong answer.

And had I the time and energy, I guess I could have moved on to JScript for the network administrator's work.