Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
The Rise of Anti-Social Networking
 
From Data Hoarding to Information Sharing
 
Foretelling Our Technological Decline & Fall?
 
Situated in CyberSpace: orcmid, Scoble, and those other guys.
 
Blog, Wiki? WIki, Blog? Oh what to do!
 
The Long Tail Meme
 
Goodbye, "Pre-Approved Offer"
 
Open Source: Taking Food from the Mouths of Capitalist Babies?
 
Scoble Links: Overwhelm of the Solitary Connector
 
Don Knuth on Science as Art and Scholarship as Community Effort

TRUST 3: Hacking the Papal Election

Schneier on Security: Hacking the Papal Election.  This is a delightful article.  I find something touching in it that wets my eyes as I read near the end.

The bottom line is in this summary:

"And a third and final lesson: when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."

The entire article reads easily and I recommend it so that all three lessons are brought home.  I am left wondering how trustworthiness, my current focus of attention, plays into this arrangement.  You'd think that trust would be at a high level in this setting (perhaps overlooking a lot of history in thinking that), yet here is an elaborate process that seems designed to limit the demands for trust.  Is that the heart of trustworthiness by protocol?  Obviously, trust must still be present.  I sense an inspirational finding here.  I am not sure how to tease it out.

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Thursday's must be TRUST day, since this is my third entry about it.  The other two are among the musings of Professor von Clueless.  This is also my chance to brag that I may get to see Bruce Schneier at tomorrow's luncheon of the Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy.  I am going to show up and pay the one-day registration so long as luncheon seats are still available.  A small price to pay to see Schneier and also thank Danah Boyd for the heads-up.  I'm going to try out Blocco, my tablet PC, and blog from there too.  And that means I must do a full backup tonight.  I mustn't have anything on the computer that I can't recover from elsewhere if I'm taking the boy-o out in traffic.  I'm way overdue for a good backup.  Oh me of little faith and great carelessness.

posted by orcmid at 4/14/2005 02:36:31 PM