News:

TESTEMONAIL:  Right and Discordianism allows room for personal interpretation. You have your theories and I have mine. Unlike Christianity, Discordia allows room for ideas and opinions, and mine is well-informed and based on ancient philosophy and theology, so, my neo-Discordian friends, open your minds to my interpretation and I will open my mind to yours. That's fair enough, right? Just claiming to be discordian should mean that your mind is open and willing to learn and share ideas. You guys are fucking bashing me and your laughing at my theologies and my friends know what's up and are laughing at you and honestly this is my last shot at putting a label on my belief structure and your making me lose all hope of ever finding a ideological group I can relate to because you don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about and everything I have said is based on the founding principals of real Discordianism. Expand your mind.

Main Menu
Menu

Show posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Show posts Menu

Messages - PeregrineBF

#241
Literate Chaotic / Re: A movie I suggest you all see
September 20, 2007, 07:44:25 AM
You want a good film with brutality? Krzysztof Kieslowski's "A short film about killing."
Or how about Hitchcock's Rear Window. All the violence is implied. You don't need outright brutality on screen to have an effect, and this film illustrates that perfectly.
#242
Literate Chaotic / Re: ATTN: Synaptyx - Meditation
September 20, 2007, 07:33:07 AM
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front
door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>N
North of House
You are facing the north side of a white house. There is no door here, and all
the windows are boarded up. To the north a narrow path winds through the trees.
>N
Forest Path
This is a path winding through a dimly lit forest. The path heads north-south
here. One particularly large tree with some low branches stands at the edge of
the path.
>U
Up a Tree
You are about 10 feet above the ground nestled among some large branches. The
nearest branch above you is above your reach.
Beside you on the branch is a small bird's nest.
In the bird's nest is a large egg encrusted with precious jewels, apparently
scavenged by a childless songbird. The egg is covered with fine gold inlay,
and ornamented in lapis lazuli and mother-of-pearl. Unlike most eggs, this one
is hinged and closed with a delicate looking clasp. The egg appears extremely
fragile.
>Get Egg
Taken.
>D
Forest Path.
>S
North of House.
>E
Behind House
You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In
one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar.
>Open Window
With great effort, you open the window far enough to allow entry.
>W
Kitchen
You are in the kitchen of the white house. A table seems to have been used
recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west and a dark
staircase can be seen leading upward. A dark chimney leads down and to the
east is a small window which is open.
On the table is an elongated brown sack, smelling of hot peppers.
A bottle is sitting on the table.
The glass bottle contains:
  A quantity of water
>Open Sack
Opening the brown sack reveals a lunch, and a clove of garlic.
>W
Living Room
You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the east, a wooden door with
strange gothic lettering to the west, which appears to be nailed shut, a
trophy case, and a large oriental rug in the center of the room.
Above the trophy case hangs an elvish sword of great antiquity.
A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case.
>Open Case
Opened.
>Get All
trophy case: The trophy case is securely fastened to the wall.
sword: Taken.
brass lantern: Taken.
carpet: The rug is extremely heavy and cannot be carried.
>move rug
With a great effort, the rug is moved to one side of the room, revealing the
dusty cover of a closed trap door.
>open trapdoor
The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase descending into
darkness.
>d
You have moved into a dark place.
The trap door crashes shut, and you hear someone barring it.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.
>turn on lantern
The brass lantern is now on.
Cellar
You are in a dark and damp cellar with a narrow passageway leading north, and
a crawlway to the south. On the west is the bottom of a steep metal ramp which
is unclimbable.
>s
East of Chasm
You are on the east edge of a chasm, the bottom of which cannot be seen. A
narrow passage goes north, and the path you are on continues to the east.
Your sword is no longer glowing.
>e
Gallery
This is an art gallery. Most of the paintings have been stolen by vandals with
exceptional taste. The vandals left through either the north or west exits.
Fortunately, there is still one chance for you to be a vandal, for on the far
wall is a painting of unparalleled beauty.
>get painting
Taken.
>w
East of Chasm
>n
Cellar
Your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow.
>n
The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole
leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls.
A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of
the room.
Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
>attack troll with sword
The fatal blow strikes the troll square in the heart:  He dies.
Almost as soon as the troll breathes his last breath, a cloud of sinister
black fog envelops him, and when the fog lifts, the carcass has disappeared.
Your sword is no longer glowing.

Etc, Etc.
"It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." <- Best line in any game, ever.
#243
Literate Chaotic / Re: Los Frupanishads
September 04, 2007, 08:21:37 PM
The second law of Thermodynamics: The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.    
This says that the total energy available to do work in an isolated system approaches zero. Nothing can move when entropy has taken its course.  However, the "isolated system" bit is key. The universe may not be an isolated system. If it isn't (and it probably isn't), the second law of thermodynamics does not apply to it as a whole (Though it does apply to some parts of the universe, and those parts may be very big.)
Of course, since entropy merely represents the probability of certain states being much higher than others in phase space then a system may come out equilibrium eventually. Total entropy need not be the end of everything, even in an isolated system. It's just so unlikely that it will take many trillions of years for anything to happen, if it ever does.
One also has to assume that the universe is a chaotic system to apply the second law of thermodynamics to it. If it isn't, then the second law does not apply. But it probably does. It's the isolated system bit that is in doubt, really.

And order does not eliminate chaos. Chaos can come from seemingly ordered systems.
For example: The quadratic map of X-> X^2+c where c is a real parameter. It's even more fun if you do it on the complex plane (z -> z^2+c). Highly chaotic, but a very simple, ordered beginning. And yet the chaos seems to contain ordered parts as well...
#244
Copenhagen is one explanation. Many-worlds is another. There are a lot more than just those. But yes, Copenhagen is generally the easiest to "understand" even if it does lead to weird paradoxical stuff that other versions may not have.
#245
Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / Re: REAL DISCORDIANS
August 24, 2007, 04:38:42 AM
Well, like I said, Real Discordians can only be defined statistically. PD.com Discordians seem to fit a much smaller spectrum, probably because we flame the heck out of a lot of others just for fun & to see if they can take it.
You gosh-darned cunt!
#246
A lot of that depends on the Copenhagen interpretation, which may or may not be the correct way to interpret it.
But QM is still very interesting, even with other interpretations (Many Worlds, etc) used.
#247
Or Kill Me / Re: Respite
August 24, 2007, 04:33:23 AM
Imperial Gunpowder is a reasonably good tea.
#248
Literate Chaotic / Anguish Languish
August 24, 2007, 03:22:50 AM
http://www.justanyone.com/allanguish.htm
Rather interesting mangling of English.
#249
Literate Chaotic / Re: The Banjo Players Must Die
August 23, 2007, 07:06:27 PM
   Use t2 for an
   index into Table Two:
   find a byte b1.

   Use t1 for an
   index into Table Three:
   find a byte b2.

   Take exclusive OR
   of b1 with b2 and
   store this in t4.

   Shift t1 right by
   a single bit (like halving);
   store this in t2.

   Take the low bit of
   t1 (so, AND it with one),
   shift it left eight bits,

   then take exclusive
   OR of that with t4; store
   this back in t1.

   Use t4 for an
   index into Table Four:
   find a byte and store

   it back in t4.
   Shift t3 right by three bits,
   take exclusive OR

   of this with t3,
   shift this right by one bit, and
   take exclusive OR

   of this with t3,
   shift this right by eight bits, and
   take exclusive OR

   of this with t3,
   shift this right by five bits, and
   (No exclusive OR!

   Orange you glad I
   didn't say banana?) take
   the low byte (by AND

   with two hundred and
   fifty-five); now store this
   into t6.  Phew!

   Shift t3 left eight
   bits, take OR with t6, and
   store this in t3.

   Use t6 for an
   index into Table Four:
   find a byte and store

   it in t6.  Add
   t6, t5, t4; store
   the sum in t5.

   Take t5's low byte
   (AND t5 with two hundred
   fifty five) to put it

   in the ith byte of
   the vector called k.  Now shift
   t5 right eight bits;

   store the result in
   t5 again.  Now that's the
   last step in the loop.

No sooner have we
finished that loop than we'll start
another; no rest

for the wicked nor
those innocents whom lawyers
serve with paperwork.

Reader!  Think not that
technical information
ought not be called speech;

think not diagrams,
schematics, tables, numbers,
formulae -- like the

terrifying and
uniquely moving, though cliche,
Einstein equation

"Energy is just
the same as matter, but for
a little factor,

speed of light by speed
of light, and we are ourselves
frozen energy."

Einstein's formula
to convert from joules into
kilogram-meters

squared per second squared,
for all its power, uses
just five characters.

But Einstein wrote to
physicists: formal, concise,
specific, detailed.

And sometimes we write
to machines to teach them how
tasks are carried out:

and sometimes we write
to our friends to show a way
tasks are carried out.

We write precisely
since such is our habit in
talking to machines;

we say exactly
how to do a thing or how
every detail works.

The poet has choice
of words and order, symbols,
imagery, and use

of metaphor.  She
can allude, suggest, permit
ambiguities.

She need not say just
what she means, for readers can
always interpret.

Poets too, despite
their famous "license" sometimes
are constrained by rules:

How often have we
heard that some strange twist of plot
or phrase was simply

"Metri causa", for
the meter's sake, solely done
"to fit the meter"?

Programmers' art as
that of natural scientists
is to be precise,

complete in every
detail of description, not
leaving things to chance.

Reader, see how yet
technical communicants
deserve free speech rights;

see how numbers, rules,
patterns, languages you don't
yourself speak yet,

still should in law be
protected from suppression,
called valuable speech!

Ending my appeal
on that note, I will describe
the second loop.  Store

nine in i; i gets
values from nine down to
naught.  Each time, do this:


And because this would take something like 20 posts to finish, go to http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/decss-haiku.txt for the full thing.
#250
Literate Chaotic / Re: The Banjo Players Must Die
August 23, 2007, 07:05:49 PM
How to decrypt a
DVD: in haiku form.
(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)
------------------------

(I abandon my
exclusive rights to make or
perform copies of

this work, U. S. Code
Title Seventeen, section
One Hundred and Six.)

Muse!  When we learned to
count, little did we know all
the things we could do

some day by shuffling
those numbers: Pythagoras
said "All is number"

long before he saw
computers and their effects,
or what they could do

by computation,
naive and mechanical
fast arithmetic.

It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math

available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.

Now help me, Muse, for
I wish to tell a piece of
controversial math,

for which the lawyers
of DVD CCA
don't forbear to sue:

that they alone should
know or have the right to teach
these skills and these rules.

(Do they understand
the content, or is it just
the effects they see?)

And all mathematics
is full of stories (just read
Eric Temple Bell);

and CSS is
no exception to this rule.
Sing, Muse, decryption

once secret, as all
knowledge, once unknown: how to
decrypt DVDs.



Arrays' elements
start with zero and count up
from there, don't forget!

Integers are four
bytes long, or thirty-two bits,
which is the same thing.

To decode these discs,
you need a master key, as
hardware vendors get.

(This is a "player
key" and some folks other than
vendors know them now.

If they didn't, there
is also a way not to
need one, to start off.)

You'll read a "disk key"
from the disc, and decrypt it
with that player key.

You'll read a "title
key" for the video file
that you want to play.

With the disk key, you
can decrypt the title key;
that decrypts the show.



Here's a description
of how a player key will
decrypt a disk key.

You need two things here:
An encrypted disk key, which
is just six bytes long.

(Only five of those
are the _key itself_, because
"zero" marks the end.

So that's five real bytes,
and eight times five is forty;
in the ideal case,

forty bits will yield
just short of two trillion
possible choices!

Ian Goldberg once
recovered a key that long
in seven half-hours.

But his office-mate
David Wagner points out that
it's _impossible_

to achieve what the
DVD CCA seems
to want to achieve,

even by making
the key some reasonable,
"adequate" key-length:

There's no way to write
a "secure" software player
which contains the key

and runs on PCs,
yet somehow prevents users
from extracting it.

If the player can
decrypt, Wagner has noted,
users can learn how.)

This is a pointer,
"KEY", to those bytes, and when we're
done, they'll be clear-text.

Oh, the other thing!
Called "im", a pointer to six
bytes: a player key.

(Now those six bytes, the
DVD CCA says
under penalty

of perjury, are
its trade secret, and you are
breaking the law if

you tell someone that,
for instance, the Xing player
used the following:

Eighty-one; and then
one hundred three -- two times; then
two hundred (less three);

two hundred twenty
four; and last (of course not least)
the humble zero.)

We will use these few
internal variables:
t1 through t6,

unsigned integers.
k, pointer to five unsigned
bytes.  i, integer.

So here's how you do
it: first, take the first byte of
im -- that's byte zero;

OR that byte with the
number 0x100
(hexadecimal --

that's two hundred and
fifty-six to you if you
prefer decimal).

Store the result in
t1.  Take byte one of im.
Store it in t2.

Take bytes two through five
of im; store them in t3.
Take its three low bits

(you can get them by
ANDing t3 with seven);
store this in t4.

Double t3, add
eight, subtract t4; store the
result in t3.

Make t5 zero.
Now we'll start a loop; set i
equal to zero.

i gets values from
zero up to four; each time,
do all of these steps:
#251
Ahh, yes, that is much better. Ok, go with that then.

I mostly did BIP to get used to the process of using Lulu, but it might come in handy.
#252
Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / Re: As Thou Wilt
August 23, 2007, 07:02:03 PM
Naw. They'll just be latched onto 98 instead of 23. But it will be slightly less related to us, and I think that might be a good thing.
#253
Discordian Recipes / Re: PORK SHOULDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
August 23, 2007, 05:18:24 AM
Cold steak can be good. Like, roast beef. I've never tried to make steak sherbet, but now I'm strangely interested.
And I'd prefer a pure hazelnut spread to nutella as I don't like chocolate. Hazelnut butter = win though.

And High Fructose Corn Syrup is not sugar. Real sugar, from sugar cane, is tariffed very, very heavily. It's not profitable to use it in foods in the US. So everyone uses HFCS instead. I live in southern California, so I can get Mexican Coke sometimes, that's made with actual sugar. Much better than the American HFCS crap.
#254
Think for Yourself, Schmuck! / Re: As Thou Wilt
August 23, 2007, 05:04:34 AM
Well, YOU don't, but you're not in on the secret.

And if we all say that bullshit in public, then others, like the myspace discordians, will start to think that 98 is the most important thing in the world and will do all the nasty numerology for us.
#255
For kicks I put up the BIP as a LULU book.
http://www.lulu.com/content/1134801
Might make it easy to print 'em, though it's a bit expensive. No royalties, of course. Had to do paperback book format as brochure can't hold enough pages. I'll probably order a few for myself to give to various people.

It might be a good idea to put the PD itself on there. Yes, SJ games publishes one, but our own print-on-demand version might be useful.