Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Thursday, November 24, 2005 |
When "real people" know you're a blogger.
Today at different events, I've seen lots of people I have known for years through family, civic and business activities. As I am whenever I hear the remark, I was surprised when several people said, "I've read your blog." (My favorite comment was someone who said, "I read about your blog.")
And then, someone didn't even say, "I've read your blog," -- they just started talking to me about a specific post I made a few days ago, picking up the conversation where I'd left off in my post.
Whenever anything like this happens, I have this strange feeling somewhere between amazement and fear. Years ago, when I started this blog, I didn't really think about it having an audience beyond the employees of Hammock Publishing and a few of my magazine wonk friends. I certainly didn't think "civilians" would discover it.
And I certainly never thought I'd be known more for being a blogger than for other things I do.
But that's okay. I like it.
Indeed, I'm thankful for it.
Heck, people used to think I had something to do with publishing.
[rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog]
7:00:51 PM 
|
|
The devil's music. Does it matter that Daniel Ludwig -- the 18-year-old alleged killer of his 14-year-old girlfriend's parents -- was a huge fan of hardcore Christian rock? [Salon salon]
10:15:46 AM
|
|
Radiohead, remixed: Me and This Army.
"Me and This Army" is a collection of 16 Radiohead tracks remixed with snippets of artists such as MF Doom, Jurassic 5, De La Soul, and more. It's as if the white label gods planted sensors inside my brain; they heard my innermost mashup prayers, and answered them here. Now all it needs is some remixed Stanley Donwood cover art...
Link to info, tracklisting, and torrent. (Thanks, Sevaan Franks)
[Boing Boing]
10:15:18 AM
|
|
Bacterial Cameras and the Fabrication Future.
 It may need four hours to take a picture, and even then only create monochrome images, but the bacterial camera made by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, could be pretty important.
Chris Voigt and his team hacked the genome of E. coli, the common food-poisoning gut microbe, to make it sensitive to light by adding sequences from photosynthesizing algae. When activated by light, the new genes can shut off the action of another gene, in this case one controlling the color of the bacteria. A sufficiently large mass of E. coli can then be used to "print" images. Because the "pixels" are bacteria, the resolution is astounding -- over one hundred megapixels per inch.
The goal of the experiment wasn't to produce a slow, massively high resolution black & white camera, however; the goal was to demonstrate the use of light sensitivity as a control for other bacterial functions.
...their success in getting an array of bacteria to respond to light could lead to the development of “nano-factories” in which minuscule amounts of substances are produced at locations precisely defined by light beams.
For instance, the gene switch need not activate a pigment, says Voigt. A different introduced gene could produce polymer-like proteins, or even precipitate a metal. “This way, the bacteria could weave a complex material,” he says. [...]
As a method of nano-manufacturing, the biocamera is an "extremely exciting advance" says Harry Kroto, the Nobel prize-winning discoverer of buckminsterfullerene, or buckyballs. "I have always thought that the first major nanotechnology advances would involve some sort of chemical modification of biology."
This bio-photolithography would be a good way of using microbes to construct macro-scale structures without having to develop complex chemical signalling mechanisms.
The image chosen for the experiment, in case you don't recognize it, is the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- and clearly this work has been touched by its noodly appendages.
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:10:44 AM
|
|
The Fading Relevance of the Feds.
We've long noted the growing importance of local and state officials in the effort to halt global warming, and now research shows that these sub-national political bodies are making a real difference. In a "Brief Communication" in the November 17 edition of Nature, Brendan Fisher and Robert Costanza from the University of Vermont show that, in the United States, up to a third of the US population lives in areas that either already have or will soon adopt policies in accord with the Kyoto protocols. Moreover, the Kyoto-friendly regions account for nearly one-half of the total US GDP -- a total economic output greater than that of Japan, currently the world's second-largest economy.
The catch is that there are few mechanisms to enforce compliance at the sub-national level, so meeting the policy commitments will be even more difficult than under a national system. Conversely, as the authors note, "the local nature of these initiatives could make it possible to develop adaptable, site-specific plans for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:10:05 AM
|
|
StarSight.
 StarSight is one of those ideas that makes one wonder why it wasn't developed years ago. StarSight combines a street light -- something which can bring down crime rates dramatically -- with solar panel, wireless network (WiFi or WiMax), remote management, local network access, and (optionally) hookups for charging small devices. The designers, UK-based Kolam Partnership and Singapore's Nex-G, describe StarSight as being a key element of a "virtual utility," a low-cost, low-maintenance provider of intangible but very useful services such as public lighting and wireless networks. All of this is very cool, and makes a great deal of sense, but there's one last element that makes it truly worldchanging:
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:09:13 AM
|
|
Twofish Cryptanalysis Rumors.
Recently I have been hearing some odd "Twofish has been broken" rumors. I thought I'd quell them once and for all.
Rumors of the death of Twofish has been greatly exaggerated.
The analysis in question is by Shiho Moriai and Yiqun Lisa Yin, who published their results in Japan in 2000. Recently, someone either got a copy of the paper or heard about the results, and rumors started spreading.
Here's the actual paper. It presents no cryptanalytic attacks, only some hypothesized differential characteristics. Moriai and Yin discovered byte-sized truncated differentials for 12- and 16-round Twofish (the full cipher has 16 rounds), but were unable to use them in any sort of attack. They also discovered a larger, 5-round truncated differential. No one has been able to convert these differentials into an attack, and Twofish is nowhere near broken. On the other hand, they are excellent and interesting results -- and it's a really good paper.
[details of results snipped]
We simply don't know whether these truncated differentials would be useful in a distinguishing attack. But what we do know is that even if everything works out perfectly to the cryptanalyst's benefit, and if an attack is possible, then such an attack is likely to require a totally unrealistic number of chosen plaintexts. 2100 plaintexts is something like a billion billion DVDs' worth of data, or a T1 line running for a million times the age of the universe. (Note that these numbers might be off by a factor of 1,000 or so. But honestly, who cares? The numbers are so huge as to be irrelevent.) And even with all that data, a distinguishing attack is not the same as a key recovery attack.
Again, I am not trying to belittle the results. Moriai and Yin did some great work here, and they deserve all kinds of credit for it. But even from a theoretical perspective, Twofish isn't even remotely broken. There have been no extensions to these results since they were published five years ago. The best Twofish cryptanalysis is still the work we did during the design process: available on the Twofish home page. [Schneier on Security]
10:08:34 AM
|
|
Dave:
Mark Pilgrim wrote an excellent tutorial for Mac users explaining how to rip a DVD for viewing on an iPod. I tried it out last night, it works. Thanks!
10:00:11 AM
|
|
|
A group of marksmen decided to see how hard it was to shoot a lock off -- pistols and rifles didn't do the trick, but a shotgun tore it to pieces. 