Interesting Stuff

Some of my readers have said they want me to post more videos I find. So here’s a Lego production line that makes cars. The button-pushing at the beginning selects what colors to use for each of the pieces. I’m very impressed with whoever made this; it’s quite a feat. Side note: how hard do you think it would be to make a von Neumann machine out of Legos? Easier or harder than making it out of custom parts?

…and just for the hell of it, here are some kittens having fun with an empty Coke box:

A coworker and I were having a discussion about general relativity, and wandered down a tangent in which our understandings of the universe differed. We both agree that each others’ explanations are plausible without any hard data against which to test predictions (and we didn’t have real data to back up any of our claims). Does anyone want to weigh in on this debate? Have cosmologists considered this idea and come to a conclusion one way or the other?

Is space itself expanding, or are the things in space just moving away from each other? →

I often listen to the radio station 93.1 JACK FM, which plays a lot of kinds of rock. In Las Vegas, however, 93.1 is The Party and plays dance music. Driving from one city to the other, there was a part in the middle where I could pick up both stations, which was pretty strange. I only got one of the stations at a time (with intermittent static), but they would switch off. I believe that when driving uphill I could get the Las Vegas station, but driving downhill I picked up the Los Angeles one. Can any physicists/electrical engineers explain why this might happen? It sounded like a bad DJ with poor taste was trying to make a remix of Independent Woman by Destiny’s Child and Poison’s Once Bitten, Twice Shy. It was bizarre.

I spent a lot of the trip on a two-lane highway through the desert, stuck in all the traffic commuting from Las Vegas back to Los Angeles. The heavy traffic displayed an unusual phenomenon, however, which I found fascinating. All of the trucks were in the right lane, as is their custom. All of the speed demons were in the left lane, as is theirs. However, due to the heavy traffic, no one was going much more than 20 mph at the most. However, the trucks, which, due to their weight, had trouble accelerating and decelerating, were trying to stay at a constant speed: they would keep a lot of space in front of them, and close this gap when the traffic in front of them slowed down (and then increase the gap as the traffic sped up). The left lane, however, vacillated between going 40 mph and being at a standstill. After the traffic in front of a car picked up, however, it would take a moment for a car to pick up and start moving again (the same problem the trucks would have had, but on a smaller scale). Consequently, the right lane, with its slow-but-steady trucks, was actually moving faster than the zippy sports cars in the left lane. I noticed this, switched to the right lane, and was amazed at how quickly I passed cars in the other lane: 4 of them would pass me, then their lane would come to a stop, and I would pass 10 of them, and this cycle repeated through the whole desert.

This behavior reminded me of Robert H. Frank’s book, The Economic Naturalist. In it, he applies economic principles to non-economic parts of life to make sense of the world around us. He describes many situations in which a certain behavior gives an individual a benefit but detracts from the group as a whole. For instance, male elephant seals compete for dominance in their territory, and then mate with the females in the area. Typically the larger male wins any dispute over territory, so the males have evolved to be larger and larger over time. They have now gotten so big that they must mate on their side, since a male would crush a female if he tried to mount her. The cars in the left lane were another example of the tragedy of the commons, and I was proud that I recognized and avoided the situation.

This weekend I went to Defcon 0xF with psifer and inferno0069, and it was a blast.

• I stopped at Arby’s for lunch on the way there. I wanted two roast beef sandwiches and a small fries, the total of which came to $7.63. I then looked at their menu, and saw they still do the “5 items for $5.95” thing. So I canceled my original order and instead got two roast beef sandwiches with cheese, a medium fries, potato cakes, and a small shake. My new total: a mere $6.44. I ate about half this food, and threw the rest out. This doesn’t seem like a good business model to me, since I’m giving them less money and taking more of their food (half of which was wasted).
• On the way there, I passed the exit for Zzyzx Road. I also drove past signs for Death Valley, which was kinda cool.
• In order to raise money to help combat AIDS in Africa, the Hacker Foundation was selling red T-shirts which said
  

  HAXO(RED)

  on the front. I wanted to get one, but they were already sold out of my size. Another shirt was too nerdy even for me: it read “chown -R us ./base” Dorks!

• I became a member of the EFF! They had a wonderful panel that covered all kinds of things they’re doing. Unfortunately, this weekend a new law was passed that makes warrantless wiretapping legal, which is something the EFF has been fighting since 2005. I’m not sure how this will fit in with a ruling last year that said that warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, but this is certainly a dark day for freedom.
• I watched macdaddyfrosh, mtbg, and magicpacket valiantly lose at Hacker Jeopardy. but I won a T-shirt from Hack A Day.
• Mike Andrews was there incognito, but I recognized him and talked to him for a bit. He might come to give a talk at my office at some point.
• I entered the lockpicking contest and picked 15 of the easier locks (so I finished the contest in the middle of the pack with 71 out of ≈300 points). I’m pretty proud of myself, since I had never picked a lock with “real” tools before the con (though I have raked Masterlocks with a safety pin and street sweeper bristle).
• Bruce Schneier held a Q&A session! That’s right: Bruce “I am a security fucking god” Schneier. [1] It was as amazing as I had hoped. That guy is so cool. I should point out that his blog has an RSS feed on LiveJournal, to which you can subscribe.
• There were several talks this year discussing the influence the hacker community has on mainstream perception of stuff, which was pretty cool. Besides the annual “internet wars overview,” there was a talk which reviewed the recent cyberwar waged against Estonia by the Russian mob. DarkTangent himself (creater of both Defcon and the Black Hat security conventions) gave his account of the infamous Ciscogate scandal. Jennifer Granick (author of that article) also gave a talk about legal case studies; she is leaving her work at Stanford next month to join the EFF. There was also a talk about the effect that the locksport community has had on improving lock mechanisms.
• There were so many amazing talks, I’m not going to discuss them all. but here’s a list of some of the cooler topics that were discussed: encrypted VoiP clients, timing attacks for botnets, digital forensics, social engineering and NLP, stopping jerks online, the basics of hardware hacking, and XSS in social networks.
• Michelle Madigan was found to be an undercover reporter (link includes video of the incident) with a secret camera. She was outed from the conference. I wasn’t there when she was caught, but I did hear about it later that day. Press at Defcon are fine when they wear their press badges, but Michelle was apparently trying to covertly get anyone at the con to admit to a felony on her secret camera so she could do a shock report on the horrible, criminal hackers at the con (I don’t think there were many criminals there, but some reporters seem to have a penchant for fabricating stories/threats to get ratings).
• I saw an OLPC XO-1 (more information on Wikipedia). It’s smaller than I expected, but the keyboard is child-sized, which makes sense. The screen is very readable (but very small). The touchpad/stylus area is pleasantly large, though.

[1] Yes, he’s so awesome that even his tmesis gets tmesis. [2]
[2] I admit, I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the word “tmesis” for a while now.

The big news tonight is that Bush has commuted I. “Scooter” Libby’s sentence. That is to say, Bush has not pardoned him for his crimes (obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements), but he has completely removed his 30-month jail sentence, saying that it was “excessive.” It seems that Bush has tried to reward a loyal flunky who has obediently taken the fall for others in the administration without overtly raising anyone above the law itself. It’s really too bad to see this cronyism taking place.

In more heartening news, the Supreme Court has unexpectedly reversed their position and agreed to consider the constitutionality of holding enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. I hope they finally agree that all civilians have the right to be charged when arrested, and the right to a trial. We’ll see how this plays out.

Vice President Cheney has been pulling shenanigans recently, claiming that he does not need to comply with a law concerning the handling of classified information because he claims he is not in the executive branch. Outside of Bush and Cheney, I can’t find anyone who thinks this is anything but preposterous. I hope this ends soon and Cheney starts complying with the laws.

and speaking of the executive branch ignoring the law, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy has said that he may cite President Bush for contempt of Congress if he does not turn over documents relating to the firing of 9 attorneys (the ones that might have been fired for political reasons under Alberto Gonzales’ watch). I suspect nothing will come of this and the Democrats will complain a bit and then just roll over (the way they did with the war spending bill). We’ll see if they have the gumption to actually stand up for themselves.

Finally, this is so fantastic I had to post it: a high schooler takes Bill O’Reilly to task and shows how he is fabricating a story by taking quotes out of context. I’m really impressed by that guy; I wish more people had the wherewithal to expose Bill for the manipulative bastard he is.

Yesterday, I was asked by an organization I trust for my phone number, home address, and a couple other pieces of information they have no business knowing. When I want their services, I go to them and I don’t need to make an appointment, so I really can’t think of a valid reason they would need my contact information. When I asked the man why he requested it, he replied that he needed to put it into their computer system to make sure my records were up to date. To the best of my knowledge, he doesn’t know why they want this information, either; he elided the question because it’s just something he’s supposed to collect from customers.

I have experienced this on several different occasions. One of the more memorable ones was when I opened my bank account: the bank wanted my social security number, approximate yearly income, and a bunch of other information I really can’t justify their having. Have you experienced a similar problem? What did you do about it? My response has been to hem and haw for a while and then just give them the information to make everything go smoothly, but it’s never sat well with me, and I’d like to find a better way of dealing with this.

We’ve all heard of people discussing whether or not ‘gruntled,’ ‘whelmed,’ ‘combobulated,’ &c are real words. The only thing I can add to that debate is that ‘whelmed’ is a real word, and it means ‘engulfed or submerged.’ What I’m more intrigued by are words that actually have valid counterparts that no one ever uses.¹ This topic came to my attention as I sat on my balcony enjoying the clement weather, and investigating it has turned my understanding of English etymology into a ravelled web once again. I want to say I’m exasperated by this, but I never started with any asperity, so I haven’t really run out of it yet.

Even more interesting, though, are the false positives. I know many people whom I consider experts in their fields, but I doubt many of them are former perts. I imagine that most discomfiture is not due to a lack of comfits. I may be decanting odd words at you, but it’s better than canting them. What a strange language we speak!

1: I admit, the dangling preposition has its place. I considered writing “By what I’m more intrigued are words…” but that was too much even for me.

Yesterday evening, John, Jacob (though not Jingleheimer-Schmidt) and I had a bull shoot for an hour and a half. We started out with John proposing a memory caching system which was intended to make garbage collection and blocking irrelevant. From there, the conversation natuarally progressed to online algorithms, cache-oblivious algorithms, religion, free will, consciousness, Searle’s Chinese Room argument, Chalmers’ Zombie Planet argument, qualia, logic-based representations of object-oriented programming, the lambda calculus, machine learning, finite discrete universes, quines, the Gödel processor, complexity theory, the No Free Lunch theorems, and probably some other topics that I’m forgetting. It was fantastic.

However, this, along with a couple other conversations this week, have showed me just how much I have forgotten since college. I couldn’t remember the phrase “competitive analysis” when we discussed online algorithms. I couldn’t come up with a representation of linked lists that supported the head and tail functions in the lambda calculus, and worse, I mixed up the S and K combinators and couldn’t even give the definition for what turned out to be the S combinator. Last week I mixed up pipelining and instruction-level parallelism, and couldn’t come up with the phrase, “speculative execution.” Last week at lunch I couldn’t come up with the formal definition of temperature (something about the kinetic energy of the molecules relative to each other and maybe the amplitude of the interatomic vibrations within the molecules, but what do you do if you have a singe atom?). Today I couldn’t explain why (if?) bending a piece of metal makes it harder but more brittle, or why bending a polymer makes it more maleable (though in my defense, I could explain the difference between stress and strain, and what a polymer is as well as a bunch of examples of polymers). I remember why the X combinator is important, but can’t give the definition for it or the Y combinator. Yesterday I realized that something I was working with was a metric space, but couldn’t remember anything useful about metric spaces (I got as far as knowing that the triangle inequality holds, but I didn’t remember anything else). I can no longer use LaGrange multipliers to optimize a quantity subject to a constraint (you need the two to have parallel tangents at the extrema, but I don’t remember how to find the slopes of these tangents). Last week I forgot the name of Topological Sort, let alone how it works (something related to DFS, but that’s all I came up with).

Now that I’m writing this, I’m noticing all sorts of other things that I used to know but can’t quite remember (how Java does garbage collection, queen-asking continuations in Roman Keycard Blackwood, how the telephone lab in Baby Stems worked). It’s scary to realize how much I’ve already forgotten, and know that I’m only going to forget more things from here on out. Does anyone want to have a refresher session? If so, post your questions (or answers) here!