Ramblings & ephemera

RFID security problems

photo credit: sleepymyf
2005
From Brian Krebs’ “Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat” (The Washington Post: 1 August 2005):
DefCon 13 also was notable for being the location where two new world records were set — both involved shooting certain electronic signals unprecedented distances. Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to [...]

The Uncanny Valley, art forgery, & love

photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]

Google’s server farm revealed

From Nicholas Carr’s “Google lifts its skirts” (Rough Type: 2 April 2009):
I was particularly surprised to learn that Google rented all its data-center space until 2005, when it built its first center. That implies that The Dalles, Oregon, plant (shown in the photo above) was the company’s first official data smelter. Each of Google’s containers [...]

Gottman on relationships

From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):
So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but [...]

2007 Summer Vacation, Day 5: 3 July 2007

Today encompassed both a disappointment and an amazing surprise where we least expected it. It’s all there – with humor, pathos, and pictures – at Tuesday, 3 July 2007.

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The neutron bomb as the most moral weapon possible

From Charles Platt’s “The Profits of Fear” (August 2005):
Sam Cohen might have remained relatively unknown, troubled by ethical lapses in government and the military but unable to do anything about them, if he had not visited Seoul in 1951, during the Korean war. In the aftermath of bombing sorties he witnessed scenes of intolerable devastation. [...]

3 English words with the most meanings

From Tim Bray’s “On Search: Squirmy Words” (29 June 2003):
First of all, the words that have the most variation in meaning and the most collisions with other words are the common ones. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the three words with the longest entries (i.e. largest number of meanings) are “set,” “run,” and “get.”

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Hulk, Willie, or Peter?

From The Sun:

SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll — and uncovered a giant green WILLY.
Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” at a seaside fair.
And when she peeled off the green comic-book character’s ripped purple shorts, she [...]