Kurt Gödel: hacking the U.S. constitution

I've been wandering through Wikipedia yesterday, and at one point ended up reading the page on Kurt Gödel. Gödel's achievements in the field of logic are indispensable to modern mathematics, and his incompleteness theorem has very far reaching implications in disciplines other than mathematics¹.

It is safe to say he was your typical deep thinker, and inward facing, not-too-closely in touch with reality type of person. This snippet from the page made me laugh real hard, because it so perfectly illustrates certain aspects of a math nerd. Listen:

Einstein and Morgenstern coached Gödel for his U.S. citizenship exam, concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his chances. When the Nazi regime was briefly mentioned, Gödel informed the presiding judge that he had discovered a way in which a dictatorship could be legally installed in the United States, through a logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution. Neither judge, nor Einstein or Morgenstern allowed Gödel to finish his line of thought and he was awarded citizenship.

(emphasis mine)

Does anyone know whether he was allowed to finish his line of thought at some other time? (Not that I'd be personally interested in executing the idea, mind you.)

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¹ Including the fact that free will of any mind is just an illusion it has because it can't contain a complete model of itself it could use for correctly predicting its own behaviour in advance. Enjoyable presentations of incompleteness theorem for layman include Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (if you're 16 or older), or Raymond Smullyan's "The Lady or the Tiger?" (if you're under 16).

Sim City goes open source

The source code for the original Sim City (the game responsible for countless hours I spent sitting in front of a computer when I was 16), have been released under GPL v3. If you ever played it (you did, right?), you had to admire all the cross-interaction of your planning decisions and certainly wondered about the underlying mechanics. Well now, you can read it first hand!
One of insightful quotes from the announcement:

The modern challenge for game programming is to deconstruct games like SimCity into reusable components for making other games!

That is a very important point, and illustrates well the unique aspect of exponential utilization opportunities of open source software. (Even if I personally believe more liberal licenses than GPL contribute towards this aspect more).

Java 6 on Leopard. Well, almost

So, it looks like there's finally a developer preview of Java 6 for Mac OS X Leopard. Am I happy? Nope. Why? Here's why:

		CPU Architecture
		PowerPC	Intel
CPU bits	32-bit		Machines I have
	64-bit	Machines I have	Machines running Java 6

It only runs on Macs with 64-bit Intel CPU. Now, I have a 64-bit PowerPC Mac, and I have a 32-bit Intel Mac, but no 64-bit Intel Mac, so no cake for me. Darn. Hopefully the final release will run on all hardware that Leopard itself can run on.

Boot Camp experiences

So, I used Boot Camp (2.0, the one that comes with Leopard) to install Windows XP on a small (16 GB) partition on my MacBook Pro. Reason being that Half-Life 2 won't run under VMWare Fusion...

I'll summarize the experience here, with emphasis on problems I encountered and how to get around them.

First, the good things. In contrast with older Boot Camp versions (1.0 and 1.1 for Tiger), you no longer need to burn a CD with Windows device drivers for Apple hardware. They are now included on the Leopard install DVD, so after Windows is installed, you just need to pop in the Leopard DVD into the drive, and let Windows autorun feature start up the driver installer from it. It will also install Apple Software Update in Windows, and it will presumably keep the drivers up to date (there are no updates right now, so I can't verify this. It will offer to install QuickTime and iTunes though...). Mac keyboard extras work perfectly (volume control buttons, brightness control buttons, eject button). All hardware - graphics, sound, wireless seems to be perfectly supported. The trackpad gestures also work as expected. I only maybe wish they could have made the Windows recognize Cmd+Tab instead of Alt+Tab for application switching...

Now for the first obstacle: Windows would not display image on the external display attached to my MacBook Pro no matter what I did. Others reported the problem on various message boards, with different proposed solutions. After several dead ends, I went exploring on my own. (Note: this solution works for MacBook Pro machines with an ATI chipset.) I ended up downloading ATI Catalyst Software Suite. It unpacks into "C:\ATI" folder by default. Within that is "C:\ATI\CCC" (for "Catalyst Control Center") folder, with a "setup.exe". It will tell you that it needs .Net 2.0 runtime to run. You can get it here.

So, install .Net 2.0 runtime, then the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). Don't try to install the full ATI suite, as it will not succeed, only install CCC. Launch CCC after installed. There is a tab where you can enable/disable various outputs and specify their order. Turns out the ATI chip in my MacBook Pro has 3 outputs (built-in display and two externals), of which two are enabled (built-in and one external), and one external is disabled. The trick is to disable the default enabled external output, and enable the one that was disabled! Voila, the external display lits up! (Regardless of whether you're connecting directly via DVI, or, as I do, through a DVI-to-VGA adapter -- there were reports on the net claiming only DVI displays will work. Fortunately, this is wrong.) Finally, you can use CCC to swap the order of the displays; if you want the external display to be the primary display (one carrying the start button and the tray (as I do)), you'll also do this.

That's all there is to it.

Second obstacle: with a newly created Windows partition, Spotlight had problems after booting back to Leopard. It started indexing it, and never finished. It was pegged at "3 minutes remaining" for about a day, and couldn't be used for searching during this time. This was particularly painful for me, as Spotlight in Leopard is so much improved that I use it all the time, especially as a lightning-quick application launcher. Solution was to disable Spotlight for the Windows partition. I guess you could do it using Spotlight preferences, but I did it by typing

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Windows \HD

from Terminal. (Of course, your Windows partition might be named differently, i.e. "NO NAME" instead of "Windows HD".) This immediately stopped indexing, and Spotlight was usable again. This might be a problem for you if you keep some content you wish to search on your Windows partition, but since I only keep few games on it, it's not a big deal for me.

Other than these two issues, I experienced no problems and am a happy camper (pun intended).