The Broken Hut

This is a call to arms

2008-02-17T21:48:21Z

This is what's known in the real world as a cheap attempt to harvest readers who may have fallen off the wagon.

My new blog is up and running (and lovely) at http://www.dougalstanton.net/blog and I'm welcoming you because you haven't been reading it.

If you don't want to leave the happy, cosy confines of LiveJournal without good reason, you can subscribe to dougalstanton which will get you the contents of my new blog in your old blog! Amazing!

Move to new domain (for real)

2007-11-05T15:22:12Z

It’s official: I am now moving my blogging activities to my own domain. I will have no-one to blame for outages but myself.

To continue reading, go to http://www.dougalstanton.net/blog/ because it’s full of excitment and all the fun of the fair.

You can also add an RSS feed if that’s the way you prefer it: http://www.dougalstanton.net/blog/index.php/feed. If you want me to add a link to your blog or site, let me know.

If I can get it working, I will try to set up an OpenID authentication so you can log in with your LJ accounts. In the mean time, the combination of a low profile and the Akismet spamblocker means I haven’t had much spam hassle yet. So authentication is currently not required.

See you over the other side!

Ah, sarcasm...

2007-10-24T08:45:28Z

On Dumbledore:

What? What?! You're telling us the courtly old British gentleman who never got married and who always dressed in purple and lavender robes was... gay?!

No! No, I refuse to believe it! It simply can't be true!

This is a spiritual awakening, friends.

2007-10-22T19:00:14Z

A friend of mine has decided to set up a religion based upon the teachings of that 80s classic, Top Gun. Think of the quality!

The quotability of the KJV. “This is what I call a target-rich environment.”
Shares prophets with other religions, just like the Abrahamic faiths. In this case, we share Tom Cruise with Scientology.
As many crazy names as the best that polytheistic religion has to offer. Maverick, Goose, Viper, Sundown, Cougar! Slider, Wolfman, Charlie, Hollywood, Iceman!
Allows for exciting drinking games beyond the consumption of communion wine (or Ribena).

The first commandment is: never leave thy wingman.

Formula for everything - not quite!

2007-10-22T08:10:45Z

In a strange rejection of the tabloid-journalism headlines where "scientists find formula for X", today's Metro reports on Formula One drivers not having a formula for success. I can't cope.

Reducing the barrier to contributing

2007-10-21T14:41:53Z

It just took me three days to commit a couple of patches to [xmonad] (http://xmonad.org/) because

it wasn’t obvious what I should commit. My change was miniscule when it was just a change to the mainline code, but substantiall larger as a “contributed plugin”. There was no mention of when one would be preferred over the other. So I did both.
it wasn’t obvious where I should commit. In the end I had to sign up for the development mailing list in order to forward my patches on.

Surely there’s a better way than this?

Rushed weekend in London for leaving party

2007-10-17T14:33:07Z

We spent the weekend in London, seeing friends from university and family. We know someone who is going away travelling for a couple of years and this was an excuse for everyone to get drunk together first.

The drinking took place in serious style in a Bavarian beerhouse. There were women serving beer and sausages while men in strange outfits sang and played the accordion.

Saturday morning journey to London

We decided to do our bit for the planet and not travel by plane. We got the 7.25 train from Waverley Station. It headed west out of the city because the south-eastern line is closed at the weekend for engineering works. The train was going via Carlisle instead.

We got as far as Slateford, which is about ten minutes walking distance from our flat, before the driver decided that there was something wrong with the train and we were heading back in to the station again. We spent about forty-five minutes on the train and didn’t leave the city limits.

Our train was half booked; the later train we were bundled onto was fully booked and had one missing carriage. So there were people standing in the aisles as soon as we left Edinburgh. I think some people had to stand all the way to London. That’s seven hours.

On the journey between Edinburgh and Newcastle there were occasional apologies from the PA system. Each time, they mentioned there might be a replacement train at Newcastle to take some of the strain off the one we were all packed into. As we got nearer to Newcastle the references to this extra train became less frequent. By the time we’d arrived at Newcastle (or actually, just outside, since we were “early” and awaiting a slot at the station) the extra train wasn’t even mentioned.

London and the Beer house

Compared to the horror of the journey down, London was a breeze. At first it looked like we’d have to stand in lengthy queues for Tube tickets, but that was just because everyone gravitated towards the first ticket booth they saw. There were announcements that there were no queues round the corner but everyone seemed to ignore them. It took us about twenty seconds to walk round the corner and find a free machine. I think we were back where we’d started, with our tickets, before the big queue had moved at all.

We were staying with h²’s relatives in London. Her cousin had just bought a flat that afternoon, so that’s where we saw them first. Then we had time for a cup of tea before we headed back out into the fray.

The beer house was a bit strange. Parts of it were every bit as tacky as you might imagine. It was more like an Ikea imagining of a Bavarian beerhouse I think, crossed with a Scream pub.

They served an interesting-sounding selection of beers that all turned out to be variations on “foamy yellow”. This was fortunate, because the object of the exercise seemed to be more quaffing and spilling beer than tasting it. On the plus side they did have a great selection of sausage platters of various types.

As with all drunken nights out, the really horrific stuff started when someone had a good look at the non-beer drinks selection and found the “Porno meter”. Yeah, I’m not kidding. It was sixteen small (25ml) shots of schnaps arrayed on a (presumably one-metre-long) plank of wood. Each glass came with a sachet of what was essentially sherbet. The procedure involved emptying the sachet onto your tongue and holding it until such point as a shot of schnaps comes as a blessed relief from the burning.

The pictures speak for themselves, I think.

Sunday morning and the return home

We had to leave the revelry before half past eleven otherwise we would have been stuck at the wrong part of London after midnight. I suppose it would have given some humour-starved cabbie the opportunity to use the “not going south of the river at this time of night” line—except, we weren’t going south of the river. Hmm. Anyway, we left early and so missed out on some of the real brain/liver cell abuse. I felt quite well the next morning. More than anything I was still tired from the journey down.

I did notice the London Mayor-approved Shampoo in the bathroom.

We had a lazy breakfast with h²’s cousins then a short lunch in their local (with raspberry beer, very nice). Then it was back into travelling mode for the journey home.

We got on fine with the return trip. The guy sitting nearest us in the carriage was talking on his phone for about 3 hours solid, but unusually it wasn’t obnoxious. One of the few people who talk at a conversational level on their phones, rather than the “talking English to foreigners” tone that a lot of people adopt…

It was a pretty exhausting weekend. I think if we try that again we’ll leave on Friday night or take a day off so we can move at a more relaxed pace.

Hill-climbing as a search technique

2007-10-16T22:35:06Z

If you’ve spent any time hillwalking at all you’ll be familiar with the “false summit effect”. From afar you can tell where the top of the mountain is, but as you get onto the slope itself your view is occluded. You fix your sights on a little hill just in front of you that blocks your view of everything else. But just as you reach this summit, you find that there’s more to come. And in the worst case, you might have to go back down from the mini-summit you’re on to reach the slopes of the higher part of the hill.

That is the false summit.

Searching for things in computer science is often likened to climbing a hill, where the summit represents the goal, and every point on the landscape represents a candidate for this goal. The idea is that, without knowing where the summit is, one can get there by always walking up hill. Assuming an ideal (smooth) landscape one could get to the top of a hill blindfold. (Not recommended.)

The flaw, which I’m sure you’ll have spotted, is the false summit. If we can’t see where we’re going then we can never be totally sure if we’re on a minor summit rather than the very top of the mountain. This is called a local maximum—every direction you walk goes down, but there is a direction which will eventually take you to a taller peak.

The solution is to add a bit of randomness. If you’re at the top and don’t know where to go, spin round in circles until you’re dizzy and then strike out in the direction you end up facing. (I don’t suggest you do this literally either. I’m not going to be responsible for dizzy people hurling themselves off hillsides.) With a bit of randomness added to the search pattern you can break out of the local maxima.

Of course, this is one of those circumstances where you can never be totally sure you’re at the summit. Though if all you’re looking for is a hill high enough then it will fit the bill adequately.

Photograph credit goes to Christof Autengruber on Flickr.

Uri Geller: as crazy as they come

2007-10-16T13:01:01Z

Sometimes the semantic gap between UK and American English provides great comedy. And let’s face it, no-one deserves to be mocked more than Uri Geller.

The spoon-bending fraud has crawled out of the woodwork again with a new TV series in the US, modelled on a similar series he did for Israeli TV. The show is called Phenomenon and aims to find a ‘successor’ to him.

Reality TV World describes the show thus:

NBC has announced Phenomenon, a new reality competition series that will follow mentalist Uri Geller and Criss Angel Mindfreak illusionist Criss Angel as they search for “the next great mentalist,” will premiere on Wednesday, October 24 at 8PM ET/PT.

If you’re still not following me, let Alan Partridge explain:

Dispatches from the fight against the endarkenment

2007-10-16T11:32:17Z

I wrote this post about a month ago but never posted it. It was written just between the broadcast of the first and second episodes of Dawkins’ The Enemies of Reason programme. I have yet to see the second episode, even after all this time.

But I thought I might as well post this; it was either that or delete it. I would also encourage everyone to read Blake Stacey’s blog, Science after Sunclipse, at http://www.sunclipse.org/.

I‘m not going to write about Dawkins’ programme The Enemies of Reason just yet. There’s still an episode to go, after all.

But I would like to briefly point to Blake Stacey’s comment on Pharyngula:

The bit with the sociology professor at the end made me want to shake the man and scream, “You think the Internet is opening up new kinds of truth? Which kind of truth makes microchips possible, you bastard!?” But maybe that’s just me; I’m probably not suited for prime time.

While Blake may not be suited for prime time, I felt exactly the same. So I’m not suited for mainstream television either, it would seem. But more should have been done in discussing the postmodernist nonsense at the heart of what he said.

Concentrated collection of nature-woo—Fire Your Doctor!

2007-10-12T21:05:38Z

This is really appalling—“Doctor Yourself”:

DoctorYourself.com

World’s Largest HEALTH HOMESTEADING website

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This especially includes your health.

What is this, hmm? This is the work of one “Andrew Saul, PhD”¹ and what a piece of work it is. Every piece of woo medicine you’ve ever read about is contained in this one website. Homeopathy? Yep. What about vitamin C as a cure for AIDS (and HPV! Double whammy on the sexually transmitted diseases there!)? Oh yeah, we got that too. Maybe throw in magnesium for epilepsy too.

But this is all run of the mill stuff. What about his assertion that “the germ theory was complete bullshit” to really throw the cat among the pigeons?

We do indeed have a proper nutcase here. And he appears to have a love affair with vitamin C. Really, there seems to be nothing it can’t be applied to that won’t be fixed within the week. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) He’s even got a full guide to strong-arming your doctors into giving intravenous vitamin C.

Unfortunately I don’t really have the medical knowledge to go through this site page by page. This is a lifetime’s project for someone.

I’ll leave you with the knowledge that Dr (or should that be “Dr”) Saul is “Assistan Editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine”, which is probably about as well regarded as Homeopathy. Ho hum.

Why does that title give me the involuntary shivers now? I suppose I’m just glad it wasn’t Dr Andrew Saul, PhD…
↩

Notes from the commute

2007-10-12T17:33:24Z

Saw a sign on a van advertising halal chicken. Four chickens for five pounds. That’s quite terrifying. To the point that I wonder how it’s possible to undercut all the supermarkets with such a small market in the first place. Sounds rather suspicious to me.

Doesn’t matter anyway. Not touching cheap meat any more if I can help it.

Also, in the newspapers: “Inquest hears of papparazi photographing Diana crash” or similar. I seem to recall that the day after the crash there was nothing on television but the news. The papers were filled with it for weeks if not months. (And it gets dredged up on a weekly basis in some of the classier red-tops.)

Where did they think all those pictures came from? “Artist’s impression”?!

In ur cultur, subvertin ur definishuns

2007-10-12T14:37:06Z

There’s a long and winding thread going on at Respectful Insolence, where the commenters are thrashing around the subject of “Jewishness” and “Judaism”. Are they different? Can one be an atheist/secular Jew?

Many people, certainly in the US, claim this is a very normal state of affairs. Here, for example, are Coturnix’s thoughts on the subject.

I am an atheist because I was born and raised in an atheist family, atheist school, atheist culture in an atheist country. I am also Jewish. How?

Because my mother is Jewish. She is also an atheist. How can she be a Jew then, you may ask?

Because her parents were Jews. And they were both atheists as well.

I need to go to the fourths generation into the past to find anyone who, apart from being Jewish also partook of Judaism.

… We dip apples in honey on Rosh Hashanah. We eat pork BBQ on Yom Kippur. We give kids eight presents over eight days of Hannukkah. We celebrate Passover as an excuse to have friends over for good food and good wine (no Manishewitz there!) and use a secular/feminist/environmentalist Haggadah for it. We eat, drink and make fun of both religion and the new-agey haggadah simultaneously.

So yes. I am Jewish.

Funny, isn’t it?

My great-grandparents were probably church-goers, and maybe my grandparents too. Though my parents weren’t, to the best of my knowledge. But we decorate a tree every Christmas and give gifts to each other. We used to roll boiled eggs down the hill outside our house at Easter, when we were younger. I still eat Easter eggs. I get a day off on Good Friday. I’m not totally opposed to the consumption of bread or wine either.

I live in a firmly Christian nation. Wikipedia suggests Christianity was introduced to Scotland in the second century AD, and that 70% of the inhabitants identify as Christian. I live in a constitutional monarchy, where the ruling monarch is also “defender of the (Christian) faith”.

Despite all this, anyone claiming I was a “secular Christian” would be recognised for the fool they were.

Homeopathy: Removing criticism increases the effect

2007-10-12T09:03:45Z

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The history of lawyers' letters used to remove material from the internet never go in favour of the lawyers' clients. This is called the Streisand effect.

The Society of Homepaths are one group who have utterly failed to learn this lesson. David Colquhuon (himself no stranger to receiving legal letters) reports on the Society of Homeopaths attempt at bullying:

Many people now have written about the disgraceful and dangerous claims by homeopaths to be able to prevent and cure malaria. My contribution was “Homeopathic 'cures' for malaria: a wicked scam”

One of the best contributions was on the Quackometer blog, The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing.

But the post has vanished! Quackometer’s ISP has received threatening letters sent by lawyers on behalf of the Society of Homeopaths, who claim that the truth i.e. [sic] defamatory, while being unwilling to say which statements are wrong. These threats have forced the removal of the post (for the moment), though you can still read it from the Google cache. And a lot of other places too.

You can read the original article here: The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing.

Completely barmy

2007-10-11T12:14:57Z

Muslim medical students get picky:

Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs.

Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity.

A small number of Muslim medical students have even refused to treat patients of the opposite sex. One male student was prepared to fail his final exams rather than carry out a basic examination of a female patient.

At what point in your adult life do you decide, "Yeah, I'd like to be a doctor but I'll only treat half the population"?

Dead man's switch and computer security

2007-10-10T22:05:38Z

This is slightly related to my post of the other day about email authentication and integrity. A warrant canary:

rsync.net Warrant Canary

Existing and proposed laws, especially as relate to the US Patriot Act, etc., provide for secret warrants, searches and seizures of data, such as library records. Some such laws provide for criminal penalties for revealing the warrant, search or seizure, disallowing the disclosure of events that would materially affect the users of a service such as rsync.net. rsync.net and its principals and employees will in fact comply with such warrants and their provisions for secrecy. rsync.net will also make available, weekly, a "warrant canary" in the form of a cryptographically signed message containing the following:
a declaration that, up to that point, no warrants have been served, nor have any searches or seizures taken place
a cut and paste headline from a major news source, establishing date
Special note should be taken if these messages ever cease being updated, or are removed from this page.

The canary (named after the sacrificial birds which were taken down the mines) is appended with the 'weekly message' (like an email) and an encrypted hash string (a digital signature). The website's public key is also published, so you can decode the signature and check its validity.

It's been over a week since the warrant canary was last updated...

Dangerous animals at fault for missing post

2007-10-10T15:17:46Z

The BBC reports:

Wildcat strikes plague Royal Mail

I thought postmen were generally plagued by large dogs, but I suppose this is the effect of XKCD from a couple of days ago.

Avoid success at all costs

2007-10-08T21:27:35Z

There is a joke in the computing industry, with regard to bugs, of programming being like sex¹—“one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life”.

The talk given by Simon Peyton Jones on Haskell’s 15th birthday mentioned:

A smallish, rather pointy-headed user-base makes Haskell nimble. Haskell has evolved rapidly and continues to do so. Motto: avoid success at all costs

Organisations are reputed to become slower to adapt as they increase in size. Small is nimble.

In sex, in business or in programming: if you want to remain unencumbered, avoid success at all costs. Some people, though, go looking for success…

I know what you’re thinking—how are programmers ever likely to know?
↩

How Romeo and Juliet defend themselves, or Email authentication

2007-10-08T20:11:26Z

The next instalment in this exciting saga of family feuds and cyberwarfare. Tybalt has sent an invitation email to Romeo, impersonating Juliet in order to tempt Romeo to reveal himself.

Romeo opens his mail and finds this message waiting for him:

From: “Juliet” juliet@capulet.net
To: “Romeo” romeo@montague.net
Subject: secret meeting

Come to the town square at midnight, behind the clock.
Come alone and make sure you’re not followed.

J. xxx

If he takes the bait and travels to meet his love, who knows what terrible fate will befall him?

Luckily, we don’t have to worry, because Romeo and Juliet have been smart. They’ve taken precautions.

Home-brew authentication

The simplest kind of precaution they could take is to include some kind of code word or shibboleth in their communications.

They could each choose a text—say, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—and use it as a method to identify themselves. In each email they could take the next word from their chosen text and just write it at the bottom. Unobtrusive and inscrutable to outsiders—but easy for the knowledgable recipient to verify.

In older times people would rely on a signature at the bottom of a letter—and maybe a wax seal—to be sure that their correspondence was genuine and from the stated person. There are modern, cryptographic equivalents to both signatures and wax seals. This is how Romeo and Juliet can properly safeguard their correspondence.

Digital signatures

The job of a digital signature is two-fold. What does Romeo want to know about the email he has received?

Is it actually from Juliet?
Was it tampered with after Juliet sent it?

The first is a question of authenticity—the name says Juliet, but is it a genuine Juliet email? The second is one of integrity—has someone intercepted the mail and rewritten it? We’ll see how digital signatures help answer these questions. We’ll look at the questions in order.

Creating a unique signature

A good signature should be one that only you can sign. But it should also allow other people to check that it’s yours. These two seem somehow contradictory—they have to look at it (to check that it’s yours) but also be prevented from looking at it (because they could copy it and sign things in your name). This calls for a special kind of signature that can be examined without being copied!

What we need is something which only you can do, but that everyone can undo. This is called public key cryptography and is quite interesting and counter-intuitive. Normal cryptography has one key which allows the owner to lock and unlock things. Public key cryptography has two keys which are intrinsically interlinked. Each is the opposite of the other in some obscure way, since each can unlock the what the other locked, but they can’t unlock what they locked themselves.

Confused yet? Yep, that happens, so we’ll go slowly. There are two keys, traditionally called Public and Private. Whatever Public locks, only Private can unlock. And what Private locks, only Public can unlock. It’s like two one-way trapdoors going in opposite directions. There is nothing special about Private that makes it private—these are just names to indicate that one is kept secret and the other is released to the public.

Let’s assume that Juliet was diligent and sat down one afternoon to make a Public/Private keychain. Romeo did the same, and they sent each other their Public keys; and they kept their Private keys private.

This means that when Juliet sends a message to Romeo she can write “it’s really me!” and lock it with her Private key. When Romeo receives the message he can unlock it with Juliet’s Public key. If it unlocks then he knows that Juliet must have created the signature, because the only thing which can lock something which can be unlocked by a Public key is its opposite, the Private key. And Juliet’s Private key is in Juliet’s possession.

Integrity

Ah, but hold on, you say. What’s to stop Tybalt cut-n-pasting a signature from a different email which he received from Juliet? What’s to stop him changing the rest of the message and just leaving the signature alone?

This is where the clever bit comes in. Juliet doesn’t create a signature which says “it’s really me!”. The signature is a fingerprint of the whole message created using a hash function. If the message changes then the hash function will no longer be valid. So while Tybalt could intercept a message, decode the signature, change the content of the message and create a new hash, he has no way of locking the new hash inside Juliet’s signature.

Tybalt could go all out and completely strip the signature and pretend it was never there—but Romeo isn’t going to trust an unsigned message, is he? It seems Tybalt can’t win.

Confidentiality

I think we can be assured that Romeo wouldn’t be silly enough to go out alone at night to meet Juliet on the evidence of an unverifiable message like that.

But what if the message was really from Juliet and she wanted to elope? She could send the same message to Romeo and sign it. But if Tybalt managed to intercept the message he would still know the full contents of the message, because it can all be unlocked with Juliet’s Public key.

What Juliet should do is lock the message so that only Romeo can unlock it. Can you think of anything which would allow anyone to lock something, but only one person could unlock it? Oh yes, it’s those Public/Private key pairs!

This time, Juliet can arrange their rendezvous. She can sign the message (which locks a message hash with her Private key). And then she can encrypt the message with Romeo’s Public key. Now even Juliet can’t read it—the only person who can unlock the whole thing is Romeo.

Email security

It is a fact that most people don’t bother with email security of this level of sophistication. Email programs have always had quite awkward encryption and digital signature features. Most people leave them alone, if they know about them at all.

And in most cases you can be assured that people don’t forge your email, intercept it to change the words, or want to ambush you while you wait for your true love at midnight. But it’s better to know than be ignorant of the possibilities.

Expletive infixing - do you agree with Wikipedia?

2007-10-08T09:21:55Z

Expletive infixation:

A simple rule is that the insertion occurs at a syllable boundary, usually just before the primary stressed syllable. Thus, one hears abso-fuckin-lutely rather than *ab-fuckin-solutely. This rule is insufficient to describe examples such as un-fuckin-believable (not *unbe-fuckin-lievable), however, so modifications to this rule are proposed such as morpheme boundaries taking precedence over stress.

Does anyone else think that it should be unbe-fucking-lievable and not un-fucking-believable? The second one just seems like three separate words and is not something I could actually say.

How to Romeo out into the open, or Spoofing email addresses

2007-10-04T12:41:26Z

Forging an email is the easiest thing in the world. Once you see how easy it is then I think you’ll understand why you should never trust the From header in an email.

A while ago I used the Montagues and Capulets to explain how the domain name system worked. I’ll do the same again to show how easy it is for anyone to spoof your email address.

The plot thickens!

As per the story, Romeo and Juliet are separated after the party. Tybalt wants to kill Romeo and knows he can use the lure of Juliet to trap him. Tybalt’s email address is tybalt@capulet.net but he wants to email romeo@montague.net as Juliet.

Ordinary email programs don‘t allow you to pretend to be someone else (though they could if they wanted). But when a program sends an email it is just having a very simple conversation with a mail server using a predefined protocol. So all Tybalt needs to do is have that same ’conversation’ with the mail server.

A program called telnet lets you get down to the gritty details. You can pretend you’re an email program, a web browser or anything else, as long as you give the correct response to the questions you receive from the other computer.

Tybalt gets started

First, he has to log in to the Capulet family mail server using telnet. The line with the dollar sign is where he runs it from the command line. You can easily try this at home if you know the name of your mail server.

$ telnet mail.capulet.net 25
Trying 192.168.2.14...
Connected to mail.capulet.net (192.168.2.14).
Escape character is '^]'.

The mail server sends messages prefixed with a number. This is the status code which your email program would recognise and respond to. The words on the rest of the line are put there for the benefit of people who want to test the system at this low level (or subvert it). Any line which doesn’t begin with a number is written by Tybalt.

First, the mail server identifies itself and then Tybalt does likewise—and pretends to be Juliet’s laptop.

220 mail.capulet.net ESMTP
HELO julietslaptop

The mail server then shows that it’s ready to take commands. This is where Tybalt pretends the email is coming from Juliet’s address and going to Romeo:

235 Nice to meet you julietslaptop
MAIL from: juliet@capulet.net
250 OK ... Sender accepted.
RCPT to: romeo@montague.net
250 OK ... Recipient accepted.

Then Tybalt has to tell the mail server to receive the content of the email, using the DATA command. Notice that he puts To and From information in this part of the message too. If he omitted these then Romeo would still get the message but the To and From headers in his email program would appear blank. This is like putting ‘Dear Romeo’ and ‘from Juliet’ inside the letter—the bit above is just the address on the envelope.

DATA
354 Ready for message. Enter "." on its own line to finish.
From: "Juliet" juliet@capulet.net
To: "Romeo" romeo@montague.net
Subject: secret meeting

Come to the town square at midnight, behind the clock.
Come alone and make sure you're not followed.

J. xxx
.
250 OK Message transmitted ID 82679401

The dirty deed is done. Tybalt can log off and head out to capture Romeo unawares.

Or will he?! Find out next time…

Why 'denialism'?

2007-10-03T08:29:28Z

Mark Hoofnagle on the place of 'denialism' as a label:

The mistake in thinking that the ideal debunker should constantly poke holes in the nonsense from the denialists is the assumption that your opponent is an honest broker in the debate. However, when they repeatedly use the dishonest tactics of denialism, which you can read in our "about" section, there is no point in repeatedly bashing their nonsense since there is no effect on the debate.

At a certain point you have to point out the deceptive practices, the unreason, and the repetition of these tactics. This ideal of perfect Aristotelian debate is naive. When you are dealing with cranks and liars at some point you have to expose the campaign they wage against science, rather than merely react to every piece of nonsense they can spew out. It also evens the playing field, as a denialist can endlessly recycle the same nonsense over and over again without much effort, while debunking requires a great deal of effort and time. Knowledge of denialism arms the people with a rapid bullshit detector, that should allow one to identify valid sources of information, and rapidly dismiss nonsensical psuedoscience without having to have an advanced degree in every damn science there is.

Sexual dimorphism of voice and effects on reproduction.

2007-10-01T08:31:21Z

Language Log discusses The Barry White effect:

All that said, we need to observe that the effect of voice pitch was a statistical tendency, a much weaker effect than I'll bet most readers of the news stories are imagining. (Those stories exaggerated and sensationalized the results of this study; in other news, the sky is still often said to be blue, and water is still widely reported to be wet.)

Just as interesting as the sensationalism and hyperbole presented in the press, was the link to Mark Liberman's lecture notes for Linguistics 001 on language and gender.

Getting to hospital at midnight

2007-09-30T14:05:34Z

Several years ago the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary moved from its central location in Edinburgh to somewhere beyond the back of beyond. The area’s even called Little France and we all know how far away France is, right?

So if you decide to move the main hospital serving a city out into the boondocks, you’d be sure to put on good transport links, wouldn’t you? I would probably have a dedicated service running from the centre to the hospital and back, every N minutes all day and all night.

In Edinburgh, this is not the case. Instead there is a rag-tag selection of buses and night buses run by private bus companies. More importantly, as I found last night, there is a gap of 90 minutes during the night when it is not possible to get from the centre of town to the hospital. And while I’m sure the doctors and nurses working A&E between 11.30 and 1am really appreciate this fall-off it doesn’t really help the rest of us.

To compound the problem it is not possible to find out which buses are actually running until you get to a bus stop and read the signs. The “24 hour, 7 days a week” phone line isn’t. The website still advertises buses that are no longer running. Even the page which advertises recent changes to their timetable doesn’t mention that one of the buses has been completely cancelled.

Last night we learned all this in the worst possible way: by leaving the house and wandering the streets for over an hour looking for buses (and latterly taxis) that just weren’t there. I am so much angrier about this matter than I could reasonably convey in a blog post.

Neologisms ahoy!

2007-09-29T21:27:09Z

A new word is born:

Considering this is programming.reddit you can count on people here having projects and such all over, source control repos with gigs of data, and sluttabytes of porn (had to make up something larger than a yottabyte).

(Emphasis all mine.)

The pun-loving fiend in me wants to ask How many Libraries of Congress is that? but I might get lynched.