Yours for a the special introductory price of ...

The student housing I lived in as an undergrad was modeled after, among other things, European monasteries, which is a nice way of saying the rooms were rather on the small and plain side ... which in turn is a nice way of saying you wouldn't want to live in them unless you really wanted to live in the student houses. Which most people did.

You may not be surprised to hear that people cared a lot about which room they ended up in.  There was a whole ritual at the beginning of the school year to decide in what order people got to pick rooms, based on one's class, status as a house officer and possibly other factors I no longer remember.  Ordering within groups of equal rank, for example most if not all the freshmen, was decided by drawing cards, and so the whole boisterous mess was called "room draw".

Why did people care so much which of several possible broom closets they ended up in?  Well, you wanted to be in the same cluster of rooms with people you liked, you might not want a room over the courtyard where the garbage trucks came at uncivilized hours of the morning, you might feel better at the end of a hall, or in the middle, you might want to be near the showers or not so near ...

The reasons were limitless and probably largely subconscious.  Sometimes it didn't matter.  Sometimes the people picking ahead of you had different priorities and you ended up with something close your ideal, but not always.  Some rooms were almost universally considered good -- and were almost always occupied by seniors -- or not so good -- "Welcome to the house, frosh.  Here's your room!"

It was not unknown for people to run for house offices in which they had little interest simply for the room pick.  Does anyone really want to be house secretary?



Did you know you can buy land on Mars?  It's not clear under what legal authority one can own land on Mars, but that hasn't stopped people from selling it.  Apparently copyright law is involved, and that ought to tell you about all you need to know.  One site quotes $30/acre.  The surface area of Mars is about 36 billion acres, so there's quite a bit of "upside potential".  I'm guessing that the site in question has sold considerably less than the full allotment, but they have sold some.

OK, let's assume that you really can own a claim on a piece of Mars.  What are you getting?

There's always the small chance that someone will set up an outpost on land you own, in which case you can say "Hey, buddy, I own that" and they can say "OK, nice to know, but we're actually on Mars and we care about your claim, why?"

What you're really buying is bragging rights.  You can say to your friends "Hey look, I own a piece of Mars.  Says so right here."  I can easily see someone wanting to pay $30 for that, especially if someone is keeping track of all the claims and you can honestly say "This particular area is mine and nobody else's (at least according to this particular keeper-tracker-of-er)".

Likewise, you can buy your name on a star.  The International Astronomical Union, being the body in charge of giving stars boring catalog numbers, won't be particularly impressed, but that won't stop people from accepting your money.  I sincerely hope that nobody is pretending that this is anything more than buying the right to have a name of your choice associated with a star of your choice in somebody's list, but again I could understand someone paying a small fee for the privilege because why not?



On the other blog I wrote about the fascinating case of Cow Clicker, a Facebook game reduced to its very essence, in which people eventually ended up paying for the right to click on a space where a virtual cow had once stood.  During the period when there were actual (virtual) cows to click on, people willingly paid for custom cows, including a $100 "Bling Cow".  Basically you were announcing to your friends "I bought a Bling Cow", plus you had the pleasure of clicking on a cow with gold accessories.



But is this business of buying virtual cattle or pieces of the sky really abstract or arbitrary enough?  We can do better.  For the low introductory prices of ... leaving a message in the comments section, I will give you your very own number.  That's right.  Just leave a short, innocuous piece of text you want immortalized, and I will send you the output of

GIBBERISH=<some randomness I will keep to myself>
MESSAGE=<your message>
echo "print 0x$(echo "${GIBBERISH}${MESSAGE}" | sha256sum | cut -c 1-64)" | python

This lovely shell incantation pastes my gibberish together with your message, uses the SHA256 cryptographic hash algorithm to boil this down to 64 digits of hexadecimal and then uses some hackery to convert that to decimal.

So long as the SHA256 algorithm remains secure, the odds that someone could find another message that gave the same number as your message are astronomically low.  For that matter, so are the odds that anyone in human history has ever seen the number for your message before, and so are the odds that anyone who doesn't know what gibberish I chose could tell you what number would result from any given message.  Yes, the recipe for mapping messages to numbers is mine ... all mine ... BWAHAHAHA!

Sorry, let it go to my head for a moment.

To get the ball rolling, I claim "squeamish ossifrage" as my message, and I am therefore proud to announce that my personal number is

71550457262820168189328333318549162861663280827014445611156956018117368386158

Let the games begin.