selling waves » Links

Posted on August 17th, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

A failure in generalship

“For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. … These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps.”

(tags: iraq vietnam war politics military)
Joint failure – The Boston Globe

“The JCS lies beyond salvaging. Before you build a new house, you tear the old one down. For the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it’s wrecking-ball time. A chairman possessing vision, strategic insight, and integrity ought to be the first to acknowledge that.”

(tags: politics military iraq war)

Posted on August 16th, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

Blows Against the Empire

“There are many books with unreliable narrators under the control of sane authors; [Valis] is the only one I know where a sane, reliable narrator (on the book’s own terms) is under the control of a clearly crazy author.”

(tags: books writing dick newyorker)

Posted on August 14th, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | 1 comment »

The Road to Clarity

Very interesting story of the development of a new typeface for American highway signage.

(tags: typography design nytimes)
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer

“While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.”

(tags: nytimes gaming china economics)
Dinosaurs with Jetpacks.

Why sell DRM-free tracks, but not through iTunes? “[T]o prevent the DRM monopoly Apple currently has going. The one, ironically, that Universal and other music companies demanded of Apple in the first place. The one that Apple also wants out of.”

(tags: apple drm music itunes piracy universal)

Posted on August 10th, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

Bonds, Mantle and disappointment

“[G]ive me the guy maybe doctoring his biochemistry in an attempt to stay around longer, do more, fend off the kids with greater fervor, even reach for some outlandish, unprecedented greatness, over the guy who literally drowns his talent over time.”

(tags: sports baseball steroids bonds mantle)

Posted on August 4th, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | 1 comment »

California voting systems code review now released

“The problems we found in the code were far more pervasive, and much more easily exploitable, than I had ever imagined they would be. … Our hard work notwithstanding, unearthing exploitable deficiencies was surprisingly — and disturbingly — easy.”

(tags: security e-voting elections politics)
Invented Usage: inventaholism

“the fallacy of the linguists’ argument … lies in the idea that construction should imply definite relationships. … the idea that some neologisms are ‘more appropriate’ than others stems from the mistaken assumption that causality matters in language change.”

(tags: grammar text culture language)

Posted on August 2nd, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

Posted on August 1st, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

SIGPIPE 13 » Using OpenSSL for license keys

Interesting discussion of how to use public-key encryption tools to create software serial numbers (and, incidentally, another object lesson in why SHA-1 being broken is important).

(tags: encryption security osx mac textmate ssl)
Threat Level

Security researchers, commissioned by the state of California, report that they can compromise each of three major e-voting systems in a number of different ways, including overwriting firmware and bypassing server clients to directly access the vote database.

(tags: security elections e-voting politics)

Posted on July 31st, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | 1 comment »

Why does the shower curtain move toward the water?

“When the simulation was complete, it showed that the spray drove a vortex. The center of this vortex–much like the center of a cyclone–is a low-pressure region. This low-pressure region is what pulls the shower curtain in.”

(tags: science physics shower scientific_american)

Posted on July 24th, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

Terrorist Watch List: 20,000 False Alarms

“How do I know they’re all false alarms? Because this administration makes a press splash with every arrest, no matter how scant the evidence is. Do you really think they would pass up a chance to tout how good the watch list is?”

(tags: rights freedom terrorism politics privacy travel)

Posted on July 23rd, 2007 by shonk in Links | permalink | no comments »

John Stachel reviews A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein

[I]t would be fair to say that arguments like Gödel’s against ‘the reality of time’ can be matched by similar arguments against ‘the reality of space’. The real question is: What is the physical significance of such models? […] To use the existence of a class of models with closed time-like world lines as an argument against the concept of time, without a shred of evidence that such models apply to any physical phenomena, is an example of that fetishism of mathematics, to which some Platonists are so prone.

(tags: math godel einstein relativity physics philosophy)

Archive for the 'Links' Category