So, apparently, there’s some ongoing issues with Turkey’s plans to purchase 100 of those boondoggle F-35s:

In particular, Turkey wants control over the aircraft’s identification friend or foe (IFF) system in order to offer more flexibility with regard to how its fleet identifies foreign air force jets. The default setting of the original U.S. software for Turkey’s F-16 fleet, for instance, identified Israeli air force jets as exclusively friendly. To overcome the problem, ASELSAN, one of Turkey’s leading defense companies, developed a new IFF system, which was finalized in September 2011 and is now operational on Turkey’s F-16 fleet. The new system allows Turkish fighters to bypass the original software restrictions, allowing Turkish pilots to determine whether to recognize Israeli fighters as either friendly or hostile.

So, somewhere deep in this $200m aircraft is a burnt PROM smaller than a thumbnail containing presumably digitally-signed, encrypted C++ code. And in that code, there’s logic that maps IFF codes to a list of known IDs, and whether they are “friends” or “foes”. The USA, as a matter of foreign policy, has decided to tag those fields “private” and “static”, but Turkey, as a matter of foreign policy, is threatening to scuttle the $20b deal because they want those fields to have public mutator methods. Bosses. Always giving engineers these late-in-the-game change orders for political reasons, and they wonder why the schedule slips.

So I was just wondering why “pesticide” means “kills pests”, “fungicide” means “kills fungi” but “barbicide” means “stuff old barbershops store combs in.” Wikipedia, of course, has the answer:

According to Ben King, son of the inventor, Maurice named the solution Barbicide because “He hated barbers. Barbicide meant ‘to kill the barber’. It was his secret joke.”

And there was yet another plan which came out of that short but endlessly significant journey — which took us to Milan too, and from there, diverted through a cholera scare, to Stressa and Paris— a plan the bordered on lunacy but was worked out by the two of us with determination and continual new jests. We hit upon the idea of creating a new type of guidebook. The series was to be called “On The Cheap.” There were to be titles like “On The Cheap Through Switzerland,” “On The Cheap In Paris,” etc. Franz [Kafka] was untiring and took a childish pleasure in compiling, down to the finest details, the principles of this type that was to make millionaires of us and above all take us out of the hideous routine of office work. I then wrote in all seriousness and put our plans for “The Reform of Guidebooks” up to publishers. Negotiations always broke down on the point that we refused to deliver up our precious secret without an enormous advance.

—Max Brod in his Kafka biography.

The cassettes are numbered, and I can’t express how important it is not to let this material out of your hands. Please do not make copies, and return this cassette the night of the 28th. In the years to come, when your children ask, ‘What did mommy and daddy do for the war against world famine?’, you can say proudly, this was your contribution.

— Quincy Jones, in a letter to the artists who would perform on the We Are The World single, accompanying the cassette containing the demo.

Does this formulation have a life outside of Patton’s Speech to the Third Army, or is QJ reffing it here in a letter about media leaks to Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis? I hope in person Quincy continued:

You WON’T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, “Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.” No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, “Son, your Granddaddy sang backup on a treacly self-involved single for a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Quincy Jones!”

Sorry. I just had a whole-body shiver of guilt for thinking bad thoughts about Quincy Jones.

Selected results from the Google search ‘I had a nightmare about Facebook’:

“I was sleeping and dreamed I had been having a conversation via email in Facebook with a friend…So my friend had sent me something and…I somehow went to another friend’s page and sent a message to them instead. The friend I sent the message to isn’t someone I know well and I would never send them any kind of flirty message. So I was quite distraught that I had. I freaked out in the dream. I was panicking. So rather than just sending another email saying, “Whoops! Sorry!” I deleted the friend. Then I was so frustrated that I couldn’t even flirt properly that I just didn’t flirt anymore with the one that was flirting.”

“Last night i had a nightmare about facebook, this morning i woke up and de-activated it. hopefully (doubtfully) for good.”

“I can’t believe i had a nightmare about facebook and lj. i dreamed that he changed his status from ‘single’ to ‘in a relationship’ and then i posted my reaction on lj: ‘nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!’

“I had a nightmare about… Facebook? I feel proud of myself for not having one. (…Yet…) So restless sleep all night, and high on lack of sleep right now.”

It’s interesting that at least two of these nightmares involve violating some codes of conduct on Facebook. In that sense, they are similar to the familiar “naked at school” dreams, but I still think it’s interesting the whatever part of the brain cooks up dreams has decided Facebook is a realm in which these anxieties are valid.

So, if Mississippi had passed its law to make fertilized embryos legally people, would that really weird up the legal system? I don’t understand enough about biology or the legal system to get this, so if you have any insights, please hit me up or write a post somewhere and send us a link. For instance:

Are “persons” and minors the same thing, legally? Or does this law make legally-minor children and their parents equal?

If you go through IVF, and you end up with a lot of non-implanted embryos, are these embryos legally people? If they die in the Petri dish, did you murder people?

If the Petri dish embryos are people, are they dependents of the gamete-supplying people? Can you keep them and claim them as a tax write-off, etc.?

What if pre-human gametes are transferred for money? Sperm and egg sales are commonplace. And the purchaser uses these gametes to create an embryo, in vitro. Who is the parent? The genetic supplier of the gamete? The purchaser? The lab tech who causes them to fuse?

If you can keep these embryos in a freezer, forever, are they legally essentially immortal people? Say we hook up a generator to the freezer and so on to save it from power cuts, etc.

If we have an embryo in a freezer, and it is an immortal person under Mississippi law, can we transfer assets to it and have it hold them in perpetuity, avoiding tax penalties, etc.?

Can the “parent” of the immortal frozen embryo retain power of attorney (related to original question) or whatever legal agency is required to have the immortal embryo adopt other people? E.g. can the embryo adopt me and claim me as a dependent, and support me, etc.?

Can I use a chain of embryos as the ownership structure of my zaibatsu, while shuffling control amongst of a chain of actual humans who are adopted, or at least paid or trusted with some authority, by the immortal embryos?

In cases of legal dispute over the inheritance chain or identities of immortal embryos (say the labels smudge off the Petri dishes), how would they be tested? You need DNA, right? But it’s not like there’s extra copies of DNA in an embryo with only one-to-a-few cells, right? There’s just the one set per cell, as far as I know. You can’t take it out and run PCR without destroying the embryo, right? More generally, isn’t the specific DNA that ends up in an embryo the result of a random process? If you have a one-celled embryo with legal personhood, can you uniquely identify which one it is, assuming you lose track at some point?

If Mississippi was ejected from the United States and became a monarchy, could it come to pass that an embryo in a freezer was king forever, and a series of regents would hold actual power? And coups and so on would focus primarily on sabotaging the freezer’s connection to electricity?

On the cochlear implant front: they now have ability to pipe audio wirelessly into your brain if you have a cochlear impant, using “hearing loops”.

Traditionally, hearing aids are available with “T-coil compatibility”, which allows certain things, like compatible telephones, to electromagnetically couple with the electronics in the hearing aid, rather than taking the tiny, noisy audio signal from a phone speaker, sending it through an airgap polluted with ambient noise, and into a microphone, and then into the headphone’s circuitry. The idea is there’s a voicecoil in the speaker anyway, and an EM field is driving it, why not pick up the electromagnetic flux in the hearing aid with a loop of wire and feed that to the amplification circuitry?

This has been expanded so that a loop of wire can be strung around a room, and an audio signal can be run through it, and then it will couple with your hearing aid and you hear it.

Naturally, they’ve made cochlear implants compatible as well. In concert halls, they will send the mix into the hearing loop. In London, black cabs have tiny microphones embedded in the dashboard, and transmitting hearing loops in the back of the cab. You can go see a performance of Wicked in New York, and the SR guys run a separate mix to the hearing loop, and if you have a cochlear implant with the T-coil mode, the EMF audio signal will go directly into your brain, no old-fashioned vibrating air necessary.

This also means, if you are Deaf, but you play the electric guitar, say, you don’t really need practice amps. You should be able to electrically hook the guitar up to your cochlea. You can buy hearing loops shaped to hang onto your ears like sunglasses, with minijack connectors for your laptop or your iPod.

There are some unsurprising problems: inductance losses roll off high frequencies (just like in any long run of audio-frequency signals through an unbalanced cable), there is limited dynamic range (more specifically, many people with severe hearing loss and the current technological remedies we have for that loss have very limited dynamic range, and so the signal must be kept within that range to avoid unpleasant artifacts). But Richard Einhorn was just on the radio saying it sounded great.

If I understand how this works, any changing electromagnetic field that’s strong enough and within the frequency range of the cochlear implant should come through into your auditory nerves, when T-coil mode is turned on. This is almost like having another sense. People with cochlear implants should be able to “hear” certain EM fields. If you walk past a huge motor, or a prime mover in a power generation facility, you should hear the deep thrum of the field thrown off by the spinning armature. In fact, the pitch would depend on how many arms the armature has, right? In multiples of the rotational frequency. You could tell something about the motor design from the octave of the “sound”.

It is entirely possible that I don’t understand this right, but I just can’t get over the fact that not only do there exist machines that wirelessly transmit audio signals directly into your brain, but that they are already commonplace. They’re in cabs. They’re installed in 18,000 post offices in the UK. The most fundamental thing about the experience of sound, that it is a vibration of air or other medium, that animals developed to sense goings-on in their environment, is now optional. It is now totally possible to electronically hijack the neural circuitry behind this purely for the exchange of cultural information like cab fares and Wizard of Oz musicals and TED talk podcasts, and to skip the whole “vibrating air” thing entirely.

This Toto song just came up on my iTunes shuffle and it made me think about how crazy it is that there’s this handful of engineers who’s work has had this huge, incredibly outsized impact on how popular music sounds: Moog, Scholz, whoever wrote the Antares autotune routine, whoever put together the sample set for the Fairlight CMI (ORCH5), Roger Linn, etc. So I was looking up who designed the original Eventide Harmonizer (fair or not, Toto puts you in the mind of old Eventide hardware) and I found this on the Eventide webpage about the H910, the original Eventide pitch processor that is on old Bowie tracks, etc:

Early customers included New York City’s Channel 5 putting an H910 to work, downward pitch shifting the audio portion of “I Love Lucy” reruns that were sped up to squeeze in more commercials.

Elsewhere on the internet, it says that the idea was that if you sped up the tape, you could edit in a few more commercials, but the audio would end up being all pitched up, so you need to be able to do a pitch-without-time-change to get the dialog and such back to normal human sound. The thing is, how many people saw I Love Lucy when it was originally on? How widespread was this practice? Do we all know Lucy’s madcap pace from these sped-up reruns? Is this the comedy equivalent of a sped-up martial arts sequence? Maybe in the original, Lucy looked like a slacker when she wasn’t able to keep up with the assembly line at the bon-bon factory. How much of its manic energy comes from being replayed sped up?