The most recent non-technical posts to Joey's blog.
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By way of Tomoko and Mom.
What I've been up to the past few days, other than nervously refreshing polling and sites over and over..
Like Anna I skulked around an abandoned farmhouse yesterday, and found a pear windfall. (Better than expected pears too.) Actually, the farm turns out to not be abandoned, the fireplace had hot coals in it. Been too long since I was out there, and in touch with what's going on.
Found the At Play column by John Harris, full of enthusiastic writing about rogue-like games.
Inspired by that I dusted off my nethack fingers. I basically suck at
nethack, but still dream of ascending one decade. But playing it on a laptop
is such a pain. I tossed together
this script to
let me use the arrow keys with nethack, rather than hjkl, because vim has
ruined me.
Oh, and I've been making salsa with the last of the summer tomatoes, as they ripen.
I voted early because Sullivan County, TN is phasing in new voting machines this election. On election day, they will use the old touch screen system, while early voters get to test the "new" paper system.
The new system is sure to please fans of paper. However, it has two flaws that were obvious to me. I have no way of knowing that my vote will be counted as I filled it out, and I realized half way through that election officials can determine how I voted. Here's why...
You have two pieces of paper during the vote. A registration sheet is signed by the voter. A paper ballot has little rectangles that the votor fills in with a ballpoint pen in the privacy of the voting booth. The instructions say to fill in choices completely. Since the voting booths have a hard top, it's difficult to write on them with a ballpoint, let alone fill in little squares completely. The natural thing to do? Slide your second piece of paper under the ballot, so the pen can dig in better. If you don't think about it, you'll probably do this unconciously.
Half-way through, I realized that I was leaving imprints on the registration paper, with my name on it, that corresponded to my choices on the ballot. Due to the two-column layout, and the distinctive spacing between different choices, it's possible to look at those imprints and determine exactly how I voted. The registration paper has to be handed in at the end, so the official who sits there all day collecting these has plenty of time to work this out and determine the votes of anyone. (I moved my ballot around and re-filled in squares to try to confuse things.)
(Relatedly, one has to carry the paper ballot around the room to take it to the voting machine. It's difficult to keep the ballot obscured while doing this, since you can't fold it, and since they take the registration paper before the ballot, so you can't keep the ballot covered with it either.)
The second obvious flaw is that once I fed my ballot into the voting machine, which presumably scanned it and put it in a safe, there was only a confimation that "you've voted!". There was no way to verify that it had counted my vote as I'd marked it.
Most voting system work seems to be in the direction of advocating paper ballots for paper ballots' sake. This doesn't seem like the right approach to me. Is no-one working on writing down the characteristics that an ideal voting system would have, and trying to make them all requirements?
My take on requirements of an ideal voting system are:
- Only living people in the set of registered voters may vote.
- Each votor can only vote once.
- The votor should be able to verify that his vote was counted correctly.
- There must be a way for the votor to prove if his vote was not counted.
- The votor must not be able to prove which way he voted (to avoid payoffs, intimidation, etc).
- Others must not be able to determine how a votor voted.
- Individual votes must be retained to allow recounts.
- The entire vote data should be published so that the results can be verified by third parties.
- The system must scale to many millions of voters.
- The correctness of the entire voting system should be formally provable.
The paper ballot system I experienced today fails on at least points #2 [A] , #3 (see above), #4 (I walked away with nothing I can use to prove anything), #5 (I can video my vote), #6 (see above), and #8 [B]. At least it scales well though.
The old touch screen system failed most of the same points, though it made at least a small attempt to satisfy #3 (by confirming the vote onscreen) -- and it failed #7, and probably scaled worse.
Outside of the American election system, I've participated in voting systems that seem able meet requirements #1 [C], #2, #3, #4, #7, #8, and #10.
To me, #10 is the most important point, but it seems to be the one that is neglected most. Some of the points may be worth weakening if they block other points. Is it really worth avoiding giving me something to prove how I've voted, and banning taking cameras into the polling place, in order to meet point #5, if this defeats point #4?
I'm curious what requirments I may have left out too. My list is just a rough stab at it. The real point is to analyze voting systems, and reject ones that don't provably meet criteria. Until it becomes accepted practice to do that, our voting systems will not get appreciably less flawed.
[A] If you can get two copies of the ballot, you can vote twice ... fairly easy with a friend on the inside to arrange for the two copies to get "stuck together", and another one at the vote scanner to allow you to scan both.
[B] The ballots could be published, but there's no way to prove all of them, or the true ballots would be. And in reality, they're either shredded, or locked away, or tossed in a dumpster, or variously all three.
[C] Mostly. Perfectly accomplishing #1 is harder than most of the other points, and may be worth leaving out of scope.
I'm getting to the point that I fear driving in North Carolina, because an exceptional percentage of car breakdowns happen to me there. The most recent one actually didn't happen in state, I'd just passed the TN border and was coming down the exceedingly twisty road to Shady Valley when I lost the engine on Mom's car.
About the time I gave up on letting it cool down and trying things, a white convertable pulled up and I got a lift down to Shady. Since this was a beautiful Sunday, the country store there had at least 500 motorcycles out front. I borrowed one of the bikers' cell phones, called a tow, and sat in a rocker on the porch and watched the insanity for an hour.
The good thing about driving old cars that sometimes break down is that you do get used to dealing with it. I actually enjoyed 95% of the incident.
Oddly, the car started without problems the next morning. Curse indeed.
I decided to get an eletric bike when my car died. Couldn't quite stomach buying a new gasoline vehicle at this point in time, didn't really feel like another used car, and the available eletric cars are still too new/expensive/hard to find. While there are some neat NEVs that are not too expensive, they're too limited to be worth my money, and eletric bikes fit into the same general niche. (So do eletric scooters, but I didn't want to spend that much money on an experiment..)
My first try was a disaster. I was thinking that a large cargo capacity would be a good thing, so I gravitated toward trikes. However, the one I tried turned out to be a lemon in several ways, and suffered a catastropic and dangerous controller burnout. So I learned that this eletric bike industry is pretty rough and ready with a lot of junk to avoid. I also learned that I don't enjoy riding trikes.
The second try was a R Martin LX1, which my dad had researched. I got it yesterday, and have ridden it some now, and I agree that it's a good one.
As a bike, it's well built, has a good back disc brake and decent front brake (will be better once I bring it to a bike shop to adjust it better), has a good derailer, and rides well. I'm no expert but it seems about as good as the bike I used to commute with, though the frame is a bit heavier. (IIRC, it was also at least $200 cheaper than that bike!)
On the eletric side, it has a relatively small and light lithium ion battery; the motor is mounted in the hub. It's strong enough to go up hills on its own if you really want it to, but you will end up pedaling to assist, which is good.
I'm undecided whether the six gears are enough ... Seems like I might want a faster gear, to be able to assist the motor more at high speed. I haven't wanted a lower gear yet, but I've not tried to do any hills without the motor's help.
The eletric controls are ok, but not perfect. I worry about accidentially twisting the throttle, although it has to be turned quite far to engage the motor.
Ideally, the pedal assist would turn the motor on exactly when you pedal, and porportionally to how hard. Instead, there'a a lag, and doesn't care how hard you pedal. This can present problems coming up to an intersection or other hazard, where pedal assist kicking in can unexpectedly be more speed than is needed. Seems a waste to have to brake to cut the assist off.
The motor is audible when accellerating, and especially complains when trying to get me up a hill on its own. At speed, or if given a human power assist, it's quieter than the chain, if not silent.
So there's room for improvement (and this would be a fun thing to do some hacking on to improve its response), but it's still a lot of fun. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy riding a bike and getting a nice workout. And it's especially nice to go up a hill pedaling only as hard as you like, to be able to accellerate quickly without standing on the pedals, and to be able to "coast" a long, long, way.
The original spec for today: Go out to Anna's. Run some cables.
Use case: Joey is in yurt. Joey has power, and even interwebs.
But this means parking the truck in the area where it got stuck the last two times. Ok, let's add in getting a load of gravel to fix that. Hmm, if we're going to get one load of gravel (over one ton already!), might as well get two...
Hmm, we didn't notice that unloading tons of gravel, for three people with shovels, is 95% of the planned work for today. Oh well, let's do it anyway...
Darn, that super-long ethernet cable that was part of the original plan doesn't work. No link at all, no lights on the cable tester. (Bisection shows the problem affects only half the cable.) At least the power cable worked. I guess that ethernet will have to be dealt with in version 2.0..
First root canal today. There were some interesting parts. I'll spare you.
If I seemed a bit annoyed with awesome 3 configuration in the last post, this has put it well in perspective.
One nice thing about awesome 3 is that it has good system tray support built in. So I've at least temporarily mainstreamed my laptop, so it's using the gnome power manager, and network manager, instead of hibernate and sleepd and my own scripts.
Leaving Doc Watson early, I headed up State St. in a hurry, taking the sidewalk to avoid the crowd in the road. But I had to stop to listen to a few classics from a five-piece string band, sitting under the awning of Uncle Sam's Loan Office, in front of the display of old stereos and swords. Bunch of real old-timers. Pulled myself away only to pass by an even better, six-piece band in the entrance to The Gold Man pawn shop. The fiddle was played by a girl who couldn't be older than ten. I wanted to listen to them some more, but I managed to pull myself away in time to get into the Paramount and get a good seat for the Red Stick Ramblers.
Conclusion: This town needs more pawn shops. And it's Rhythm and Roots time in Bristol.
Best bands so far: Mike Marshall's trio, Cephas and Wiggins, Larry Keel and Natural Bridge, Chatham County Line.
Sitting next to the fire after heating up fajitas for dinner. Making sure that no hot coals make it over to the canvas topped yurt. Maybe I should have made the fire further off. I've gotten 1/3 of the way through Anathem, and Neal Stephenson has thoroughly hooked me now. I know I won't have enough battery power to read all I'd like to tonight. But for now, I've been enjoying the evening, which has been unusually long today. Maybe it's a remnant of Hurricane Ike that's led to such a cool, cloudy day, but it's seemed to be on the verge of dusk for hours.
Someone asked if the yurt has wifi. Nope, but I measured the distance today, and at 400 feet it's too far for cat 5 ethernet w/o a repeater.
Anyway, I seem to be in a very good frame of mind for starting Anathem, and am enjoying its take on the Long Now. Out at the falls this weekend I kept imagining how they'd change in geologic time, tracking where the water seemed to have fallen earler, downstream. And sitting up under the overhang of the falls, was briefly nervous about it coming down (as it will in oh, a few thousand years perhaps), before getting back into the present moment.
Ran out to Abram's falls today. Very nice. Was going to take pictures again, but again my camera battery mysteriosly died before I got to the falls. It was gorgeous.