10.13.2004: News of the Wearied
We were selected (almost two months ago) as foster parents for a baby boy who would be willing to adopt him if parental rights are terminated (as seems likely.) Well, after many, many phone calls (including some by our state representative wishing to do a good deed in an election year) the baby has finally been placed in our home. At least with the delay we had time to prepare, and at seven months he's a little better at sleeping through the night than he was at five months (according to the previous foster family, who was not willing to adopt - the reason we were selected.)
Well, a little better, mostly. He's been in our home less than a week now and hasn't really fallen into a routine yet; hopefully now that he's starting his new day care he can adjust to a (more) regular habit. He only actually woke up once last night; and he slept well until my wife got up (I leave the house pretty early, usually before she is awake.)
His main problem seems to be constipation - or something, you certainly couldn't tell he was having problems in that department from looking at diaper production. He makes these little grunting noises that sound like constipation, anyway. Sometimes we go in and find him grunting while actually still asleep (perhaps he's dreaming of being constipated?) Luckily he likes GerberTM prunes; that seems to help.
In other stories, a friend loaned me a copy of a book called 'Digital Fortress'. What a mess. The author's writing is very predictable and his characters are all 2-D clichés (the late-bloomer beauty-with-brains heroine, the fatherly boss, the perverted nerd who doesn't know everyone thinks he's a sleaze, the fat nerd who's whole life is tech, the hi-tech assassin who enjoys the kill more than the money and takes pride in his 'art', the sexy latino lunch lady named 'Carmen', the brilliant and flawless college professor who speaks so many languages fluently he can pull off Spanish with a German accent, the secretary who has the effective control over her superiors, etc. and so on...).
He also needs to research his facts a little more. For the sake of fairness and not giving away the little plot that there is, I can't tell you all of the technical faults here. But I'll share the biggest one I found: the book concerns a new encryption algorithm that is supposedly unbreakable by brute-force methods (i.e., trying one password after another till something works.) The algorithm has been encrypted with itself and placed on the internet for anyone to try and crack. The author is offering to sell the passcode to the highest bidder. Well, if a passcode were all that were required, brute force would work. If brute force doesn't work for some reason, you must need the new algorithm to know how to decrypt it: so locking it up with itself is tantamount to throwing away the key.
Then there's a small scene at the beginning which I don't mind ruining because it's only to introduce a character, it doesn't affect the rest of the book. The character is a language expert and is called in to translate some Mandarin Chinese characters that cryptology has decoded. He is given the pieces out of order ("so he won't know what he's translating"), and he does translate them. But the crypto folks say it doesn't make sense when they put it back together. The language expert notices that all the characters he has been given are in the "Kanji Language" and gives them those translations instead, and Violá! it works!
Now I don't know much about Mandarin Chinese. I can say 'Hello' ('Nihao'), 'Goodbye' ('Zai jian') and 'I Love You' ('Wo ai ni' ...don't ask.) But I do know a little about Japanese. So I had many issues with the above scenario:
- There is no such thing as the "Kanji Language" - Kanji is the name for the subset of Chinese characters adopted by the Japanese as part of their writing system.
- It's only part, after all. You could maybe put up a sign or label in all Kanji, but you can't make a Japanese sentence with only Kanji characters. Word order doesn't mean as much in Japanese as it does in English (so mixing it up wouldn't have hidden much anyway); the grammar requires that various parts of the sentence be identified with certain particles. These grammatical particles can only be written with Japanese phonetic characters called Kana, and usually Hiragana to be specific. So if the message is all Kanji, it is Pidgin Japanese at best.
- I don't know if this is true for the more complex characters, but it is for the simpler ones: Chinese characters are simplified pictographs, that is they originally were pictures that represented the actual object or idea behind them. The Japanese borrowed the characters they did based on their meanings, not because they looked pretty. So the character for 'Water' (for example) was once a picture of flowing water. The stylized and simplified modern character now represents a certain Chinese word that means 'Water'. That same character, when used in Japanese, is pronounced differently but it still means 'Water'. So the little revelation about Kanji vs. Mandarin Chinese should not make a lot of difference when translated into English.
You may know of this book or it's author. He's famous for writing 'The Davinci Code' (which I haven't read yet; but after 'Digital Fortress' I am in no hurry to do so.) I remember hearing that there was some controversy over the phrase 'inspired by actual events' that was printed on the cover of 'The Davinci Code'. Later, after the publishers had made several million and Mr. Brown's next book was firmly on the bestseller list the publishers came out with a statement that said basically "the phase 'inspired by actual events' is part of the fiction. We assumed the public would understand that." What, in the same way that we all assume that books labeled 'Fiction' actually really did happen? Digital Fortress contains a 'quiet dedication' to two unnamed government agents behind anonymous remailers that were invaluable in the writing of this book. Anyone wanna lay odds on the actual existance of those two? I'm taking the publishers advice and assuming that it is 'part of the fiction' - real crypto experts would have set him straight on a few things.
My coworker loaned me the book since I have always been somewhat fascinated with codes and such. Personally, I would only recommend the book to people who know nothing about them, like the author.
Jesus saves! The rest of us better make backups. -- Unknown
