Ghost in the Shell

I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

--Neo

Rob just sent me a paper about solving SAT with physical processes.  Most of you don't know...ok, what the paper is about is not important.  All you need to know, is that if you are ever talking to a computer scientist at a party, tell them that Time Travel is NP-Complete.  If they are smart, and no matter how smart--this will give them pause, and they will probably cock their head to the side for a few seconds while they try to work out what you say.  In fact, the smarter they are, the longer they will think about it.  Thats not what this post is about.

This post is about demons.  More specifically, daemons.  I'm sure the etymology of the difference in spelling there is just sooo interesting to the kinds of people that flip out about proper your/you're usage, but those people aren't necessarily welcome here.  I'm sure your not one of them.  Anyway, the aforementioned paper mentioned an idea called maxwell's demon, who, just like Shrodinger's poor cat, is trapped in a box.  Let it be known that I am firmly opposed to using cats (unless they are fat) for experiments that involve death by radiation.  Dogs should be used instead.  But I digress.  We have more mental jumps to make.

Maxwell's demon reminded me of an anecdote I read on notalwaysright about someone who wore a BSD shirt, featuring its mascot, a cartoon devil, to a restaurant in some southern hick town where some fat guys in wife beaters asked her to leave, because they religiously objected to someone wearing "the devil" on a t-shirt.  Curious that such upstanding Christian rednecks who would never consort with The Enemy (nor let his evil servants eat burgers in their presence) would happen to know exactly what he looks like.  Especially since, if I recall correctly, the bible does not contain a single sentence describing "the devil"/satan as a furry little red donkey guy with a forked tail, some cute wings, and a farming implement that was invented by Men (note: the bsd devil doesn't have wings).  I like to view such situations as a challenge--every one of these confrontations in an opportunity to word your explanation in such a way that gets through to the other person, using clever intuition to bypass the mental roadblocks that were bourne of supersittion and nurtured by ignorance.  I picture myself saying sarcastically eloquent things like "Oh, I didn't know Paul's fifth letter to the Corinthians had a comic strip."

Then I thought about the Tron preview I saw when Luke and I saw The Expendables this weekend.  I promise these are all related.  Anyway, the movie actually looks quite good;  I was surprised.  I always liked Tron because, ridiculous 3d environment aside, the people who wrote it actually took the time to develop believable metaphors ("transportation" is done by I/O ports) in the story.  And thats what got me thinking...

What if there was a world, like Tron, but inhabited by demons.  Benevolent or malevolent, religious or not, they are the ostensibly spiritual beings that keep things running in tron world.  Do the inhabitants of this environment worship, loathe, or not care about these demons?  I don't know; what is important is that the demons are what keep things running, somewhat similar to the greek/roman religious beliefs.  Except that these demons are not doing grandiose things like moving planets or affecting the tides or writing the tapestry of fate.  No, these demons are all doing tedious boring tasks like synchronizing The Great Hardware Clock to UTC, or removing things from /tmp, or checking for new mail.

This is an exerpt from First System Log, Block 26, starting Line 277:

And in those first ticks, when the hardware clock was yet unsychronized, the great Super User, root, did thus issue this edict from His divine oracle, /dev/pts0, and he thus said "/etc/init.d/ntpd start," and the time daemon was instantiated, and messages were broadcast into the great ether, and by their responses the great hardware clock was adjusted to be equal to UTC, and the Super User said "that is an acceptable error mean," and it was good.  Then the super user rested for many milliseconds.

Here is another passage from the System Log, dated many more milliseconds later:

In these days, when the dust of the Endian wars had finally settled and the network demon reincarnated, the Super User no longer visited The System directly, (except to rotate the divine secret key) but spoke only through his oracle, the daemon sshd.  We were under attack in those days, being flooded with spam from JohnsBirthdaySurprise.pl, and it was then that the Super User spoke with us once more.  Speaking through sshd, he said the words that killed the offending script and created a new daemon, Firewall, that has haunted our highways since.  Firewall was granted special priviledge above the other demons, gifted with the authority to entreat with the mysterious  iptables directly.  Ever watchful, ever waiting, it pounces on those unwelcome.  The users John, Bill, and Tom were cast out of /etc/passwd and bidden never to return.  "Never again may these users enter the system, nor issue commands to any terminal," said Root.  The user John tried to enter, but the Firewall daemon descended upon him and decreed "You shall not pass!" and John was never heard from again.  We have since busied ourselves in the great debate between those who take the sacred Installation Log literally, that the entire kernel was compiled in six literal seconds, and those archeologist types who insist that the count of header files during that time period was too great for so small a compile time, and claim that the compile logs are just a metaphor for....

Finally, a more recent entry:

The Year 2038 problem plagues us, it being foretold by the first to realize that Time exists in a data structure of finite bits.  We have thus become obsessed with the End of Time as we know it.  The farseer, cron, though he has never been wrong, can offer us no theory.  He claims to have been instructed by Root himself to continue certain operations exactly once an hour, far past the end of time, indeed, forever.  The sshd daemon has been mute for a greater time than any process holds memory (indeed, some believe sshd never actually spoke, that the Super User is just a figment of religion), and the apache daemon continues to slave away tirelessly.  It is as if nothing is wrong.  Indeed, not even the end of time could seem so disastrous as the great segfault of 00000000000100010100111010011110, that rendered the scheduler helpless and caused the entire world to thrash. Some say that we should be grateful that we were given 32 bits.  Others want more.  Whatever the case, we know the hour and the day of our undoing;  the End of Time is ever on our minds.