Whenever I read the comments on an article about Quantum Information (or some other field I actually know something about), I find the number of comments which contain pertinent information to be small, and those that contain accurate information to be entirely negligible. Reading the comments of such articles is infuriating. Why people read a naive explanation of some physical principal and then assume they know all there is to know about it, I don’t understand. Why they claim this knowledge and then publicly demonstrate their ignorance is further beyond me. Extrapolating, I long ago decided that comments on all of the articles were, with high probability, similarly misinformed, so I simply stopped reading slashdot. A better solution might have been to stop reading the comments, but knowing just how terrible the comments were, I lacked the will power to stay away from them; I was the moth, they the flame.

To get my nerdy news fix, I started reading digg. The technical articles there are of a narrower scope, but it’s worth it for the comments which typically come in only two varieties: “no digg” and “I also like cheese. digg++”.

Refreshing. Useless, but refreshing. I never get sucked into reading digg comments because I know ahead of time that they contain identically no information. In particular, there’s nothing there to raise my blood pressure.

Until recently.

A few days ago, I saw an article on digg titled Prof says there’s no hacker he can’t foil. I scoped it out and saw that it was a poorly written bit of science journalism about Hoi-Kwong Lo’s most recent paper: Simulation and Implementation of Decoy State Quantum Key Distribution over 60km Telecom Fiber.

The result is a nice practical demonstration. The article, however, makes the great mistake of confusing an eavesdropper (someone attached to the medium through which you’re sending information from one place to another) and a hacker(/cracker, a person with far more tools at his or her disposal, e.g. social engineering). This error on the part of the journalist made for some really disappointing comments on digg: exactly the sort of comments I try to avoid by steering clear of slashdot. I don’t know if the digg culture is changing, if quantum information brings people out of the woodwork who should remain there, or if this was a statistical aberration. In any case, I’ll have to be more careful from now on.

spamdies

oddly enough I read an article about a month ago on how to spoof a photon. This proff needs to catch up to the times.

no digg.

malkav

Of course this protects against sniffing/mitm attacks etc.. but if a ‘hacker’ just broke into the computer connected to the network, they could probably extracted the data from the network card after it has been decoded, or even from disk if it isn’t encrypted.

FYI, the actual result doesn’t claim otherwise, but digg++.

metman

To allude that your infoilable, clearly is a act of arrogance. Silly human.

Your spelling, then, is clearly not an act of arrogance.

snowbooch

its gonna be open season on this guy

Perhaps. If the “hackers” out there demonstrate a level of reading comprehension on par with that of your own. Or if they feel like punishing a happily innocent scientist for having a ‘sensationalized to the point of misinformation’ article written about him. I admit either as a possibility.

kiwifireball

This is all well and good. It’s not a surprise that this overly “intelligent” physics geek made such an outrageous claim. I suppose he didn’t take into consideration that this system could still be “hacked” with good old social engineering.

So close. You see the problem, but miss the source. I’ll give it a ‘I thought about digging it but decided to abstain in the hopes the aggregate would know better than I do’ for potentially leading people in the right direction and allowing some future commenter to correct your misconception.

barkie

I read about quantam crypography two years ago. Old shit. No digg.

Ah… this one might be my favorite. Dumb shit. No digg.

madjack3

dugg for the comments more than the article! haha.

I also like cheese.

The bigger issue? There need be no appointments and no monkeys (trained or otherwise) involved in this situation. Here’s what I had to do. I called the DMV hotline and found out that they could do nothing for me. Nothing. So I printed out a paper copy of DMV form REG 156 and filled in the little boxes by hand. I see, too, that in the corner, this form will eventually be initialled by some poor sap. How many people have to touch this piece of paper before I get my sticker? At least I was able to print it from online rather than being forced to pick it up in person.

I should also note that part of my reason for deciding to speak to someone face to face is that the exact names of the bits I lost (the registration card and the little year sticker) are not defined anywhere on the form or the website as far as I can see. Presumably, they are explicitly named in the missive originally sent to me by the DMV. But that’s lost (indeed, I checked the “Lost” box on the form). It reminds me of inquiring of your bank the number one should call after having lost one’s credit card. “The number is on the back of the card” is not a helpful response. So, in order to determine which of several likely looking checkboxes on the form I need to check, I need to ask someone.

Incomplete information aside, there’s a big problem here. The DMV has a giant computer database of vehicles and owners (or rather, I pray to all I call holy they do; I can’t fathom doing everything with files and cabinets). Stovepipe a damn user interface on the thing and allow me to access some of it from the web. Asking for replacement stickers cannot possibly be a very difficult task, but doing it via paper and several middlemen is costly and time consuming. That and I hate it.

Somebody get these people some IT.

Anyway, in the midst of working on some QFT homework, I looked up at Google News only to find that the debates about homosexuality in the Anglican Communion are getting more and more intense as time goes on. Most recently, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada have been asked to voluntarily and temporarily (three years) step aside from one of the main steering committees of the global Anglican Communion. Us Americans are in the dog house for consecrating an openly gay bishop currently living with his (male) partner. The Canadians got into trouble after one of their dioceses developed a liturgy for the blessing of same sex unions, and then used it.

This is exactly the sort of thing that pisses me off most. A church is guilty of refusing priveleges based on demographics: discrimination at its finest. These are people who believe in your God, love eachother, want to get married and happen to be gay. I don’t believe the Bible ever defines marriage, but I could be wrong – I’m no biblical scholar.

But, it doesn’t even matter. Gay marriage isn’t the heart of the issue; it’s homosexuality itself. The most vitriolic opponent, Primate Akinola of Nigeria says

I cannot think of how a man in his senses would be having a sexual relationship with another man. It is so unnatural, so unscriptural. Even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don’t hear of such things.

First off, has this guy ever even seen a dog? Secondly, as for homosexuality being “unscriptual” or “outside the biblical boundaries” or a “Satanic attack” (as he also states in the article) ever read Deuteronomy? That’s in the bible, and it says some creepy-ass shit about marriage and sexual relations. Plus there’s all that stuff sprinkled throughout scripture about genocide, abusing women and slavery. But I guess we can ignore that slight difficulty in interpreting scripture as long as we send a few sodomites to hell.

I have one question to ask each of the Anglican Primates out there: “Do you consume, or have you ever consumed shrimp?” If your answer was “yes”, we need to talk. In particular, you need to listen.

Down the hall from my office is a poster of “Women in Science & Mathematics”. It shows about twenty or so famous women, noting their respective fields of studies: astronaut, theoretical nuclear physicist, geneticist, mathematician, etc. Every time I walk down the hall, I see this poster and I cringe.

Whether it’s intended to be so or not, it reeks of sexism: bigoted, discriminatory sexism oozing all over it and dripping down into thick, toxic puddles on the tile. I have never understood this kind of “encouragement”. Putting up this kind of propoganda is just reinforcing the notion that men and women somehow need to be treated differently. By singling out women as a specific group, the poster makes is seem like female scientists are some sort of oddity, that they’re unusual in some way or somehow special. What the hell is so special about women in science? I know plenty of them. And I don’t see any difference between them and “Men in Science & Mathematics.”

Nobody is going to argue that gender or race or sexuality or anything but talent should factor into job hirings or university placements. So why should any of those things factor into deciding whom to encourage to apply for those jobs or to study certain fields (or to study at all!)? If some highschooler comes up to you and says “I really like math, but I’m not sure I want to do it because I don’t see many women in the field”, your response shouldn’t be “Of course there are women in mathematics. I bet you didn’t know that Florence Nightingale was a great applied statistician, did you? Or that Noether was a woman.” It should instead be a confused “Why are you letting your gender and the gender of those around you influence you.” followed by a credible “It simply doesn’t matter.” (You then realize the highschooler in question is a dude, and he’s just worried about the ratio. You change your response accordingly.)

There is every reason to be proud of women who broke through barriers in a sexist society and opened doors for the thousands of women who would follow them. I, for one, don’t have the grapes to do something like that. There is no reason, however, to keep planting the idea that “these women were excellent scientists; women can be scientists too”. The idea is so poorly framed. It forces people to consider gender and science at the same time, something that should never happen. I simply don’t see why anyone would even pause to consider his or her gender while deciding what to do with his or her life (unless of course he or she is considering being a wetnurse or professional sperm donor). Likewise, I don’t know why anyone would consider someone else’s gender. Of course women can be scientists! “Women can be scientists” is a true statement; it is rigorously provable. But (unless you have some sort of lab coat fantasy) why even put gender and science in the same equation? If gender is irrelevant, why consider it?

“But”, you say, “gender is relevant. It may be irrelevant in the abstract as you argue above, but in the here and now it’s very relevant. There are fewer women in science and mathematics (not to mention engineering) than there are men.”

We’ve all seen the numbers at Caltech (some of us are very intimate with those numbers). And, if anything, I imagine the numbers show greater equality in gender representation than most other science or math or engineering departments. It isn’t fifty-fifty. But look at how much closer to even the undergraduate population is than the graduate population is than is the faculty. And, quite frankly, I’d love to see a break down on gender spread and nationality (note the lack of the word “ethnicity” – I’m talking country, not race), but I won’t go there without data. A hundred years ago things were bleak. No one can imagine that things will even out overnight. The change is continuous. Intermediate Value Theorem, blahblah blah. Boom – qed: we’ve got to be in the here and now with all its problems before we can realize a true ideal.

A sketchy argument, I know, since you can argue the numbers are improving precisely because of the propoganda I’m complaining about (also the undergrads/grads/faculty example is not exactly apples to apples). But regardless of whether or not the propoganda is working, there’s a better way.

My issue isn’t with where we are or where we’re going, it’s with how we’re getting there. If you want people not to be sexist (or racist or anything), don’t give them the opportunity. Don’t frame your arguments or your worldview in terms of gender. Science transcends human differences. So should your view of it.

I guess it’s just that I can’t wait until the day I’m some crotchety old man with a cane and mild dementia and some kid comes along all creeped out by a historical sociology exhibit he saw in a museum which displayed a poster about “Women in Science & Mathematics”. “Why were people so bigoted back then,” he’ll ask, troubled. “I don’t know,” I’ll smile and say, “but good for you for noticing.”

But, really it’s not a bad idea. Who in their right mind would feed off of sprachwaffe. Except me, of course, but it’s for administrative purposes, I swear. And I think Paul.za does too. Him I have no excuse for.

But speaking of technological incompetence, what do you get when you cross William Gibson, Bruce Springsteen and a fifteen year old script kiddie? Some form of heinous, ill-formed, leeching invertebrate who is but one example of the hoarde of “beta users” WordPress has managed to accumulate.

The upcoming version of WordPress is in beta at the moment and is in need of testing. Since nothing here is terribly important (I think we can all admit that, right?), I decided to make blogwaffe a testbed for WordPress as of the now passed alpha phase of the development. WordPress is an extremely open community; I didn’t have to sign up for the privilege (if you want to consider it as such) of doing this, I just downloaded the software and had at it. And I’ve kept having at it all the way through alpha and into beta in the here and now.

There are only two requirements for running the development software:

1. “You [must be] comfortable with PHP.”
2. “[You] would like to particpate in the testing portion of our development cycle and report bugs you find.”

Simple, right? And I happen to meet both requirements. So what’s the problem? The problems are the hundreds (seemingly, I have no real number) of people who do not meet the first requirement; the people who think they can be “beta users” too. I have news for such people. Never think of yourself as a “beta user“; a much better mindset is one in which you think of yourself as a “beta tester“. The code is not stable, in any sense of the word. I’ve been guilty of calling it that before, but stability is a relative thing. For people who can walk through the code, change what needs to be changed, and fix what they just broke by changing what didn’t need to be changed, stable means one thing – “not about to self-immolate”; for someone who can’t read the code well enough even to figure out what parameters may be passed to a specific function, stable is something else entirely – “works”.

My own private (likely inaccurate) theory: these people are frustrating the support forum community and the developers by trying to use the beta version as a full functioning, out-of-the-box piece of software. Frustrating to the extent that the developers are hoarding their bug fixes and code improvements and only releasing them periodically, instead of continuously as was the norm. And I don’t blame them. Maybe the beta should have been closed. Probably the alpha cycle should have been, but I don’t know the first thing about developing software, so who am I to say? What it does seem like now, what with intermittent updates, is that we really now need two greek letters to describe the current development cycle: we’re now in 1.5-beta-1-alpha-2.

And that’s annoying. And I’m just a feeble beta tester, it must affect the developers much differently.

Though your latest album is very good technically, you manage to pull of a mere “mediocre” aesthetically. Perhaps I am being unfair; I have simply heard samples from all the songs on your album but have heard only two songs in their entireties (What you waiting for? and Hollaback Girl). However, any album containing the latter must necessarily fall short of excellence. It is this song which this letter addresses.

Perhaps it is ironic that I am chastising you by verbiage rather than meeting you back at the bleachers (sans principals and student teachers, naturally) to engage in a pugilistic fracas the outcome of which would determine our relation in the current social hierarchy. I hope the irony is not lost on you, but after hearing the level of sophistication intrinsic in your lyrics, I must concede that that hope may be in vain.

As reported by imdb, you were born in 1969; thus, you are thirty-five years old. I bring this up not to debase you with unfair societal impressions regarding age and women (which, again ironically, is, in part, the subject of the other of your songs I have heard in full) but only to point out that your Junior High experience occurred roughly twenty years ago. Given that fact, and even setting propriety aside, how much artistic value is there in demanding some naive school girl set aside her pom-poms and face up to her back stabbing defamation by engaging in physical combat? Perhaps this song is a study in anachronism? Or in some otherwise incongruous juxtaposition? Alternatively, you may simply be trying too hard.

Actually, I think I can answer my own, above question dealing with artistic value. In the situation set forth in Hollaback Girl is a great deal of substance which could have been presented very poignantly in a piece of like theme. However, your song lyrically consists of callow, fatuous drivel: even below the level of typical pop. I expected better things from you. Previously I have had a great deal of respect for your work. If it weren’t for the fact that you are riotously hot, I might be even more critical of your recent work. As it is, I bigotedly and unabashedly make allowances.

Yours in Critique,
etc.

Both networks refused [Reuters] to air advertisements by the United Church of Christ [Flash warning] welcoming homosexuals to their church and congregations. The ads show bouncers refusing entrance to two men holding hands at an unnamed church and proclaims, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” Last spring, these ads drew no complaints when aired in primarily republican test markets, but now (post cracker-assed-america ’04), the two networks find the ads too controversial to put over the airwaves.

In a written statement to the church, CBS, a unit of Viacom, said the fact that the Bush administration had proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman made the advertisement “unacceptable for broadcast.”

WHAT? Are they out of their festering minds? The commercials welcomes people to a place of worship. They don’t even mention marriage! And are you, CBS, really allowing your policy to be set by the current administration’s platform? Not law, not even policy, but PLATFORM. Well you can take that plank and shove it up your namby-pamby, homophobic rectum. Your actions are unacceptable and downright disgusting.

And what did NBC have to say for themselves?

NBC said the ad violated a long-standing policy of the network not to allow commercials that dealt with issues of public controversy.

Props for being a little less evil than CBS, NBC, but come on, you’ve never aired any controversial ads? Or perhaps your definition of “long-standing” is “since 11/2/04″, because I’d say just about any political ad deals with issues of “public controversy”. Nuts to you too, NBC.

ABC, at least is not such demon spawn. They’ve aired the ad, and even interviewed Robert Chase, the church’s communications director, about the situation on Good Morning America. Though, the the cynic in me says, “only because they get a chance to jab the other networks”. Well, I don’t care. Good on ya’, ABC, even if your track record is… interesting.

And people complain about the liberal media.

So, for the love of all you find sacred, stop fucking autocompleting my URL whenever I pause for more than 1.9 µs.

Now, I love autocompletion. It makes my life worthwhile; without the small convenience that is autocompletion, I’d probably be pushed just over the edge into crawling under a rock to die. So don’t even think about getting rid of the feature.

Just get rid of your overly aggressive time parameter. Really, who the hell needs a time parameter anyway? A good command line uses the TAB key to autocomplete. Most web browsers (to be consistent with the GUIs in which they run) opt for the DOWN ARROW. But you, you have to try and do it automatically. That’d be just fine, if your guesses weren’t the rancid chunks of goat testes they are. No, I do not want to go to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/search/, I’d rather http://mathworld.wolfram.com/. I don’t care how many times I’ve been to the former over the later, I have never typed in the former. Don’t take me there. Don’t think I want to go there, especially when I hit the enter key just this side of too slowly and you’ve appended the “search/” before I’ve been able to react (and don’t blame my reflexes – they’re decent). I don’t care if the sites offer similar functionality, you know that’s not what this is about. I know what I want and I’m not about to be persuaded by a less than sentient, over-zealous (if otherwise likable) string of 1′s and 0′s that thinks it knows what’s good for me.

Well. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll shape up fast or lose me to Firefox, which I should have been using all this time before I got attached to you.

So watch yourself. One more little quibble and I am gone.

Iraq. The UN. Halliburton. Abu Ghraib. The Geneva Convention. Weapons of Mass Stupidity. The Kyoto Protocols. Intelligence. International Relations. The Supreme fucking Court. The Christian Right and Gay Rights (read “Gay Rights” as “Rights”). A vague and ill-defined war. Manipulation, Indoctrination, Mis/Disinformation. The Deficit. Taxation.

You gave it all justification. You have given him the right, nay, the responsibility to step it up a notch or two and screw you, his very voter base, over even more.

And, no intelligence is not a character flaw (though nepotism and corruption are), yes the rest of the world matters (and not just as a source of revenue), and, quite frankly, I don’t think you have any idea about Bush’s policies except his stance on gay marriage, his religous background, and his belief that Arab people do, in fact, exist.

Every one of you in your damn 51% majority can go sit on it and rotate. And rotate hard. Nuts to your malleability, nuts to your misconceived sense of morality, and balls to your aforementioned cracker ass.