Ramblings & ephemera
From David G. Post’s “Jefferson’s Moose” (Remarks presented at the Stanford Law School Conference on Privacy in Cyberspace: 7 February 2000):
In 1787, Jefferson, then the American Minister to France, had the “complete skeleton, skin & horns of the Moose” shipped to him in Paris and mounted in the lobby of his hotel. One can only [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, science | No Comments »
From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
But if the direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, there are at least four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important.
The first source of tension arises from the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, religion, science | No Comments »
From Allen Abel And Madeleine Czigler’s “Submarines, bananas and taxis” (National Post: 24 June 2008):
Depicted in frescoes and canvases from the early Middle Ages onward in the robes of the betrayer of the Christ, “Judas yellow” devolved into an imprint of depravity, treason and exclusion.
…
By the 12th century, European Jews were compelled to wear yellow [...]
Posted on March 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, religion | No Comments »
From Michael Reilly’s “In-flight surveillance could foil terrorists in the sky” (New Scientist: 29 May 2008):
CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and passenger aircraft could be next.
A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and “Big Brother” software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.
The [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Dan Goodin’s “Crimeware giants form botnet tag team” (The Register: 5 September 2008):
The Rock Phish gang – one of the net’s most notorious phishing outfits – has teamed up with another criminal heavyweight called Asprox in overhauling its network with state-of-the-art technology, according to researchers from RSA.
Over the past five months, Rock Phishers have [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From James Bamford’s “Big Brother Is Listening” (The Atlantic: April 2006):
This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court—made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States—as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The court’s job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Chapter 2: Botnets Overview of Craig A. Schiller’s Botnets: The Killer Web App (Syngress: 2007):
Dollar-Revenue and GimmyCash are two companies that have paid for installation of their Adware programs. Each has a pay rate formula based on the country of installation. Dollar-Revenue pays 30 cents for installing their adware in a U. S. [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis’ “The Athens Affair” (IEEE Spectrum: July 2007):
On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.
The next [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Charles C. Mann’s “America, Found & Lost” (National Geographic: May 2007):
It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | No Comments »
From BBC News’ “CCTV boom ‘failing to cut crime’” (6 May 2008):
Huge investment in closed-circuit TV technology has failed to cut UK crime, a senior police officer has warned.
Det Ch Insp Mick Neville said the system was an “utter fiasco” – with only 3% of London’s street robberies being solved using security cameras.
Although Britain had [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
Microsoft Vista for IT Security Professionals is designed for the professional system administrators who need to securely deploy Microsoft Vista in their networks. Readers will not only learn about the new security features of Vista, but they will learn how to safely integrate Vista with their existing wired and wireless network infrastructure and safely deploy [...]
Posted on February 23rd, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, personal, security, technology | No Comments »
From Nicholas Lemann’s “The Murrow Doctrine” (The New Yorker: 23 & 30 January 2006: 38-43):
There is a memorable entry in William Shirer’s Berlin Diary in which he describes – as, in effect, something that happened at work one day – the birth of broadcast journalism. It was Sunday, March 13, 1938, the day after Nazi [...]
Posted on July 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 March 2006):
In the Netherlands, criminals are stealing money from ATM machines by blowing them up. First, they drill a hole in an ATM and fill it with some sort of gas. Then, they ignite the gas — from a safe distance — and clean up the money that [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s “The Water Rush” (Oxford American):
Europeans drink water for what’s in it, for its minerality, while Americans tend to drink water for what’s not in it.
Related posts
Why did Thomas Jefferson bring a stuffed moose to France?
How the settlers changed America’s ecology, radically
A homogenized religion for America in the 21st century
Why the US toppled [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | Comments Off
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