blogwaffe

I had a debate with michelle the other day that started with me making the statement above. My argument was that artists are going to spend a long time composing and brooding over a work of sadness because they have nothing better to do; they’re sad. A happy song, however, will be written quickly; the artist has better things to be getting on with.

Now, I know there will be many who disagree with this assessment (or the conclusion), so allow me to seal the deal by offering up a concrete example grounded in objectivity that will surely convince even the most fervorous of dissenters: Elliott Smith v. The Village People.

As long as nobody brings up Belle and Sebastian, I think we’ve got that all settled.

jeff and ariele inviteg greg and me to a Last Comic Standing taping this afternoon at the Pasadena Civic Center.

It airs tonight at 9 (8 central).

Apparently you can see me several times during the show, so watch it and admire my too hot visage.

Through some random promotion, I was given a trial membership of Amazon’s Amazon Prime, a service offering free two-day shipping on most items and overnight shipping for only $4 per item. It’s a really ncie service, but I just don’t think I shop enough to warrant the $80 per year fee for the permenant membership.

So I cancelled it, and it was ridiculously easy; no AOL is Amazon [2].

Check out these delightful screen grabs.

Not even a browser refresh between them; just click the button and, a little javascript fade later, it’s all done.

Nice job, Amazon.

That’s the war cry I heard walking down Wilson Ave next to Caltech this morning.

A man was shouting these words at Broad over and over again with an odd accent. I believed it to be Middle Eastern.

cal polY
SHAME on you
DON’T
CHEAT
the PEOple

I have tried to capture the rhythm of his chant by denoting the accented syllables with capital letters.

I walked by him, not really catching the words he was saying, and ran into Will. Will told me what the lone protestor was yelling and asked, “Do you think it’d be appropriate to tell him this is Caltech?” I smiled and said, “sure”. We walked over to him and he and Will exchanged the following words.

Will: Excuse me?
Protestor: Yes? (with polite anticipation)
Will: This is Caltech, not Cal Poly
Protester: Thanks! Cal Poly has a better rhyme (very kindly and thankfully, and with no trace whatsoever of any accent)

We walked away and exchanged amusement. Right before we parted ways, we heard the guy start to mix it up: “Caltech, shame on you. Don’t cheat the people! Caltech poly, shame on you. Don’t cheat the people!” and so on.

I have no idea what issue the guy was airing. It was just a great way to start the day hearing some dude shouting at Broad caring more about how his chant sounded than to whom he was actually directing it.

Several months ago, I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout. On the whole, I’m quite happy about the switch. I’m still a little disjointed when going back and forth between it and QWERTY, but otherwise things are quite smooth.

I do still, however, make a few common typos; I’ll sometimes mix up the following pairs of letters: a and o, e and o, k and x, m and w, and l and s (each pair has adjacent constituents). I’ll also sometimes type characters out of order (presumably because the Dvorak “rhythm” is somewhat different than that at the QWERTY layout).

But I always made lots of typos. It seems, however, that more typos slip through my pinky’s erstwhile diligence at backspace patrol. I believe there are several factors at play here.

1. I make more typos than before. This explanation is extremely dull. Let us never speak of it again.
2. I don’t make more typos, I just catch more; I’ve become better at proofing my writing. This explanation I’ve included only for the sake of completeness. I can’t imagine I’m actually any better at proof reading now than a year ago, say.
3. I don’t yet feel the typos when typing on a Dvorak keyboard (as I do on QWERTY) and so must depend on my eyes to catch them. This would be related to my relative lack of comfort with Dvorak’s “rhythm”.
4. And finally, I treat vowels and consonants differently. Most of the single character typos I make swap two vowels. When proof reading, it seems harder for me to catch the difference between “color” and “coler” than between “color” and “colwr”. This is interesting. Two possibilities come to mind. To work backward, the second possibility is that the letters a o and e, in their respective lower case forms, look somewhat similar: round (as opposed to the letters o and w). Indeed, the consonants I swap most often also have some sort of “shape similarity”: w and m, and k and x. I don’t think this can be the whole story, though. Continuing backward, the first possibility is that I only read the consonants and that the vowels act mostly as placeholders (and as the occasional disambiguators). This possibility I called “first” because I am irrationally attached to it and proclaim it to be “likely” without any data to back me up. Since all the vowels are grouped together on the Dvorak layout, vowel swaps may be more common and (given this “likely” possibility) cause commensurate unnoticed typos. Perhaps Dr. Language person can comment on the merit of this “I don’t read vowels” possibility.

In any case, I’m not that good at typing, but I never have been. Don’t blame Dvorak.

allen posed a problem to me many have faced before. He was on the phone with a friend of his when his call was dropped*. He called back, but so did his friend and apparently at just the right time such that each reached only the other’s voice mail rather than the other’s actual self. In comedic fashion, this dialing around in circles happened multiple times. Frustration abounded.

The solution, he believes, is the development of a universally known and agreed upon protocol for how to reestablish a broken telephone conversation (be it cellular or landlinear).

I am here to state the optimal such protocol. You are here to read it, accept it, and follow it unconditionally.

The telephone post-disconnect redialing protocol for two parties

Whoever dialled that specific call must redial the call if the connection is lost, unless otherwise explicitly agreed upon by both parties during the course of that specific call.

The question is one of who should call whom. The above is optimal (for the appropriate definition of optimal) due to the following considerations.

1. The caller should not put financial burden on the callee.
2. The callee may not know the phone number of the caller, while it is clear the caller has access to the number of the callee.
3. There is no mention of alternate Tuesdays or the color of either party’s socks.

Go forth and propagate this decree unto the masses.

* Information is passed from cell phone to cell phone by electromagnetic waves cleverly encoding digital information in a fault tolerant and secure fashion such that your voice gets through with reasonable clarity to the party on the other end of the “line” without anyone else being able to listen in. These electromagnetic waves are simply a fancy technical sounding word for “cell phone fairies”. These eager, though sometimes clumsy, creatures occasionally drop your voice as they carry it from one phone to another, hence the term.

I’ve long hated slashdot. The articles that make it to the front page are typically pretty good, but the summaries are sometimes misleading, poorly worded or written by someone who clearly had no idea what the article was actually about. Worse, and the actual source of my hate, are the comments each submission acquires.

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.