T-Shirts, Neil Young, Asilomar, and Smalltalk

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

This may set a new record for me in putting seemingly unrelated topics
into a single post!. But upon getting home from a technial conference
last night (which had Neil Young as a participant) and getting ready
for a Pink Floyd concert in distant Oakland, I found 210 e-mail
messages on my machine, most of them Cypherpunks. No way can I digest
them soon (and Netcom compressed them before I could download them
with Eudora....ah, the wonders of these systems).

So, without furhter explanation, a move from "Cypherpunk Criminal"
t-shirts to Neil Young to capability-based systems to enviroments for
developing protocols:


> Christian,
> 
> I finally received my tees in the mail yesterday.
> 
> Very, very cool. The .gifs certainly didn't do them justice.
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> _______________________________________________________________________________
> Paul Ferguson                         

I got a Cypherpunk Criminal t-shirt, from Curtis Frye (thanks!), as I
had neglected to get my order to Christian in on time.

I agree that it's a great t-shirt! I wore it at the Asilomar
Microcomputer Workshop, where it got a lot of interest. Ironically,
most of the interest was in the number on the back, not the giant
lettering on the front...I guess it proves that people talk behind my
back.

Neil Young, the music guy (and one of my all-time favorites), was at
the conference to talk about his joint venture with Lionel Trains (*),
and he smiled when he read what was on the t-shirt.

(*) Neil Young has a 600-acre ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a
huge model train setup, which he uses with his disabled son. He's very
supportive of technology for the handicapped, and wanted a
"tetherless" radio control for train setups. For the past 10 years
he's funded efforts, most of which were derailed by technical problems
(like sending logic signal in an extremely RF-noisy environment).

The problem is making a system backwards-campatible with the installed
base of Lionel trains (and others that use the same power system, the
same "blue sparks" (lots of RF!), etc. He recently worked with some
guys he met through the Asilomar conference, including our own Bruce
Koball, and great progress was made.

After achieving some success, including a "manufacturable" system, he
met with the President of Lionel, who got over his initial skepticism
and became a supporter. A 50/50 partnership called "LionTech" exists
and is set to roll out a complete system of backwards-compatible
controllers and whatnot, this coming October. (New engines, with sound
effects, including digitally recorded-and-compressed railroad sounds,
are needed, but old tracks, old transformers, old cars, etc., will
still work.)

It looks pretty exciting, and I suspect it'll sell well. (I suggested
thy work with Fry's Electronics, the mega-electronics chain in the Bay
Area, and Neil thought this was a great idea, as Fry's has huge
amounts of floor space for a good demo setup.)

Neil was also very much interested in other kinds of tech (no, I
didn't hit him up to fund digital banks!) and it was a real pleasure
to be able to talk to him in such a small setting....the 100 or so
attendees at Asilomar were in the sharpest possible contrast with
seeing Pink Floyd last night in the Oakland Stadium!

I hope this isn't too far "off the track," so to speak, for this
group.

I did give a 25-minute talk on "Implications of Cryptography," which
generated some good discussion. I also cemented some thoughts in
discussion with Bernard Peuto and Ted Kaehler about the need for a
deeper analysis of the old computer science work on "mutually
suspicious cooperating agents," which was predicted to be a Big Thing
for computer science (along with objects, segmented logical address
spaces, and several other such Good Ideas), but which faded out when C
and flat, Unix-style address spaces came to the fore.

Some of these failed ideas could finally achieve more prominence where
they are actually needed: not built into high-volume mass-market
microprocessors (where the failures like the i432 occurred), but used
instead in digital money, reputation-based systems, etc. (The academic
cryptographers are mostly oblivious, it seems to me, to the work done
in operating systems and agoric systems.)

The work of Norm Hardy, Dean Tribble, discussed here a couple of
times--but always useful to do again--immediately comes to mind.

Food for thought. I'm wondering if a project to implement a kind of
"Digital Money World," perhaps in SmalltalkAgents, wouldn't be an
interesting project. (Many will probably tell me that a collection of
Perl scripts would be more "portable" and more useful to the current
Unixcentric community....something I'd like to see more discussion
of.)

Exciting times.

--Tim May

-- 
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,  
tcmay@netcom.com       | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409           | knowledge, reputations, information markets, 
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA  | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."