Wednesday  31 Mar 2010           2 comments

A few words of explanation as to why I have, for a while, left Lone Pine:

I hadn't had (paying) work in about five years. Good work that I can do from home is harder to come by nowadays.

An opportunity came up to do interesting work with someone I very much enjoyed working with when I'd lived in Colorado before (in the 1980s). I don't mind working alone, but there are many aspects of working together with good people that I had been missing.

This is also an experiment in doing without a bunch of things I had been accustomed to. I fancied myself as having achieved a level of equanimity that would let me do that without much discomfort; time will tell if I was too optimistic in that regard.

The work I came here for is interesting because it's an attempt to address a long-standing, important problem.

Monday  29 Mar 2010           comment?

I'm in Longmont, Colorado after about 1300 miles of driving. Got here Sunday and started work today.

Tuesday  23 Mar 2010           3 comments

Last time I moved (12.3 years ago), I had a bunch of bad luck with vehicles.

Last October, Tommyjournal started being deluged with spam comments--just when I was leaving town for several days. I disabled comments altogether until I had a chance to set up better countermeasures.

I had bad vehicle luck a couple days ago (someone backed into my car), and just today Tommyjournalcomments fended off a few spam attempts (the first in a while). Indeed, I must be moving.

Your Tommy will be working in Colorado for a while. I leave in a few days. More details once I get settled.

Monday  22 Mar 2010           comment?

James Randi, champion of critical thinking (and conjuror extraordinaire), has come out to the world about being gay.

I'm friends with James Randi's foster son Steven. Randi saw Steven performing as a (teenage) magician many years ago and took him under his wing. Steven went from a difficult home life to living under Randi's roof, where he could hang out with Martin Gardner, Isaac Asimov, and other distinguished associates. Steven told me that Randi's generosity was not a quid pro sexual quo; he made no advances toward Steven, who is straight. And yes, Steven is good looking.

Randi said that not coming out would be "dishonesty by omission". I don't take that as criticism of all who are not out, but rather as affirmation of the standards Randi sets for himself.

Some people say you can't be virtuous without being religious. I note that Randi is an atheist, and I contrast his treatment of Steven with the Catholic church's treatment of boys. I also contrast the church's attempts to keep indiscretions quiet with Randi's coming out for the sake of completeness, even though his sexuality has little or no bearing on his work.

Wednesday  17 Mar 2010           comment?

and slightly farther down the road:

Sunday  14 Mar 2010           1 comment

From an article about Pi Day:

If a circle is such a simple shape, how can its key proportion be so complex?

Who says pi is complicated?
It's 4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + ... , for example.

Why is it impossible to know what pi is exactly, its digits continuing on infinitely in a seemingly random fashion?

Who says decimal representation is essential to knowing what a number is exactly? Decimal (or place-value in general) is not the only way to represent numbers, nor is it the only notation that makes computation possible.

If decimal notation is your preferred means for knowing what a number is, and if you think pi is more complicated than, say, one-- consider that pi has a unique decimal representation, whereas one is either 1 or 0.999... .

Wednesday  10 Mar 2010           2 comments

A few years back I went into an electrical supply store and had this conversation with the dude behind the counter:

Tommy:	Do you have any solder?
dude:	What's solder?
Tommy:	It's an alloy of tin and lead.
dude:	What does it look like?
Tommy:	It looks like silvery wire on a spool.
dude:	What do you do with it?
Tommy:	You melt it to make electrical connections.
dude:	So it's a liquid?

The next day, at a musical instrument dealer, a conversation with the dude in the percussion department started like this:

Tommy:	Do you have any marimbas?
dude:	Refresh my memory-- what's a marimba?

Saturday  06 Mar 2010           comment?

The Nietzsche Family Circus.

Thursday  04 Mar 2010           2 comments

Another Republican family man (well, divorced--but that's par for the course) with a not-so-gay-friendly voting record may turn out to be into dudes (and was busted for DUI, with blood alcohol reported at 0.14%).

That alone would be unremarkable. I bring it up only because this one is the state senator for my district.

Wednesday  03 Mar 2010           comment?

PDF documents can be encrypted so as to require a password in order to make sense of them. Not long ago, PDF only supported 40 bit encryption keys (US law at the time restricted the export of strong encryption software).

There are 1,099,511,627,776 different 40-bit keys, few enough that a program can try them all before you're dead. It was trivial to tell when you hit pay dirt; each encrypted PDF file contained a 32-byte string that would yield 28 bf 4e 5e 4e 75 8a 41 64 00 4e 56 ff fa 01 08 2e 2e 00 b6 d0 68 3e 80 2f 0c a9 fe 64 53 69 7a when decrypted with the proper key. It's as if Adobe put the string in PDF files to make cracking the encryption more pleasant.

In April 2001, I had three CPUs at work trying all the possible keys to decrypt a certain PDF document. The full search would take several weeks. For fun, I asked a friend to guess which day the correct key would be found on.

After about a week, one of the CPUs found the right key. Whether or not my friend guessed right depends on how you reckon what day it was. His guess was correct in his time zone but not in mine; the key was found shortly after midnight his time.

Coincidentally, the date of Easter that year also depended on a what-day-is-it-where issue. In April 2001, the moon was full at a moment that was Saturday in California and Sunday in Vatican City and Jerusalem. (The latter point of view prevailed.)

This has been a roundabout way to introduce this panel from Monday's Dinosaur Comics: