So much for the “obesity epidemic.” 🙂 (There’s something I’ve wondered about the “Body Mass Index,” or BMI, ever since I learned how it was calculated: why the heck would medical professionals use such a measurement? It’s obvious to anyone with a math education that it couldn’t be right — it assumes that a person’s …
Continue reading ‘“Being a skinny is much more unhealthy than being fat – new study”’ »
This had better become required by law, and soon, if the government wants people to trust electronic voting machines. Every security expert who’s even glanced at them has been appalled at how easily they can be manipulated. Related and possibly-interesting note: a significant part of one of the Stainless Steel Rat books — written long …
Continue reading ‘“Researchers propose simple fix to thwart e-voting attack”’ »
There are three interesting things on this page: An “interactive brute force search space calculator” for passwords, which you can play with to get a good idea how easily a brute-force attack would find YOUR passwords. Some comments further down the page on mathematical entropy, and how it doesn’t affect password strength (despite common wisdom …
I’m sure this experiment saved on banana costs — and machine repair and replacement costs, apparently — but a little statistical math could have told him the same thing a lot faster. (The comment about the interview with Fox News amuses me, as even more evidence that regular Fox News viewers are on the low …
Continue reading ‘“Virtual cloud monkeys go bananas writing Shakespeare”’ »
I was rather surprised at this assertion, at first. Then I thought about it… there are only about 95 printable characters in the basic seven-bit ASCII character set. A very conservative estimate puts the number of distinct English words at well over 65,000, most of which are many letters long. If you knew that someone’s …
If asked, I’d have said this wasn’t possible. Just goes to prove that I’m not omniscient. 😉 I wonder what use someone will find for it. The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it. — Harry Emerson Fosdick
I think the spammer registration problem may be dealt with, at least for the moment. Since I added the new layers of defenses, only one spammer account has gotten through the first layer of registration (which checks its information against multiple online databases of known spammers). It failed the e-mail confirmation step and was auto-deleted …
The odds are that you’ve heard about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient (2000+ years old) mechanical device that was dredged up off of Greece more than a century ago. Four years ago, scientists finally figured out what it was for, calculating solar eclipses and other celestial events. It was really big news at the time, …
Continue reading ‘Antikythera Mechanism Duplicated — in Lego!’ »
A useful skill. I didn’t realize that anyone had written a book about it. It’s available as a free PDF file too, there’s a download link in the “related links” section. I’ve picked it up, and I plan to read it when I have a chance. (Via BoingBoing)
The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything may be 42, but it seems that the ultimate answer to how many moves (at most) it would take for an omniscient being to solve the Rubik’s Cube is much lower. (No omniscient beings were harmed in the calculation of that answer.) 😉