I didn't finish "Javantea's Guide for Technophobes". Oh well. I did do two mini murals for wrapping of two other presents. Christmas isn't about presents in case you didn't hear that ten thousand times before now. I'm getting along with my dad this Christmas. We argue, but that's cool. If we didn't, we'd be lying to ourselves and each other. We disagree on many issues. He is intelligent, so his arguments are interesting. He doesn't swallow what he hears on the TV hook, line, and sinker. Certainly that's a sign of hope.

The PNG version of this is absolutely huge. 1700 pixels or so. If it crashes your computer, send me the bill. Wait, don't. Send the bill to the maker of the software that didn't allow for large pictures (likely Microsoft if it's IE or KDE if it's KPaint or Konqueror). They'll probably send it back to you saying that you agreed in the EULA that the damage resulting in using their product is to be paid by you. A malicious hacker who wants to crash someone's computer quickly can simply make a huge blank image compressed with PNG and social engineer it to you. Since most programs allocate the uncompressed amount of data, you'll lose all your physical memory and a lot of your swap. If you don't have a Gig of swap, lots of physical memory, and a fast computer, you're a gonner. Why do programmers give the malicious ones all the power and denies it to the benevolent hacker? Because the benevolent hacker exploits the computer to everyone's mutual benefit (a tough task) while the malevolent hacker uses his/her knowledge to benefit only him/herself at the cost of others (an easy task). That, my hacker-in-training friends, is your lesson for tonight. Use your knowledge for the benefit of everyone or keep it inside your walls. I am living proof: people that come here will see my hacking and benefit. If they do not benefit, they will not come here.

Tonight, I spent a little time on a logo. I'm always trying to make JF look better and this is an attempt. Using Kontour, KDE 3.0's Open Source/Free Software vector graphics program, I made these two drawings. Then I used GIMP to dress them up by using simple blur/sharpen filters. It worked pretty well. The one in the lower right is just a fun one that probably will not get further than a modest mention in this Making Of as the lesson of the day. Today's lesson is beauty. Many say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It depends who you ask. Usually I'm more a fan of that beauty is that which is _good_. However, we physicists have a very objective definition of beauty: lack of entropy and symmetry. Not just in our thermodynamics and electromagnetism do we look for low-entropy systems and symmetry. To find people of the opposite gender, we look for these two attributes. Let's define them. Entropy basically is the order of a system. Something chaotic is high entropy. How do we define order? By probability and usable energy. Noise is high entropy because it is highly disordered. If your TV screen is filled with a bunch of perfect diagonal lines through it, check the wires because it is not likely to be normal noise/entropy, but rather a simple loose connection to cause such a low entropy error. And then there is probability. The probability that you get four aces in poker is low, so getting four aces is a low entropy state: someone is likely fixing the deck. But getting a four, five, ten, jack, and queen is more likely than four aces since there are four fours, four fives, four tens, four jacks, and four queens while there are only four aces. Then we have symmetry. This is more often applied to beauty because a lot of living thing are symmetric, humans for one. There's azimuthal symmetry (EM students love that), radial symmetry, mirror symmetry, and a few others. Anything crooked is automatically less beautiful because it is not symmetric. Buck teeth and freckles can be a positive attribute if they are symmetric.