February 2008

Emily kindly sent me a link to the video of Sir Nicholas Stern’s presentation in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February of 2007. I was lucky enough to attend in person; I even got to speak with him at the exclusive reception afterwards. My notes are on the wiki. This is your chance to [...]

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At some point in the past five or six years, skimming became my default form of reading. Depending on the material, as little as a few seconds per page might be devoted to initial assessment. While this does allow for a person to process much more information, there is an extent to which it forces [...]

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The Stern Review - released in October 2006 by the British Government - is generally considered the most authoritative source on the economics of climate change. Among other things, it concludes that the cost of reducing global emissions is significantly less than the probable costs associated with letting climate change continue on its present course. [...]

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Most successful attacks against strong, well-designed encryption take the form of ’side channel’ attacks: ones that aren’t based on breaking the strong cryptographic algorithm, but which are based or circumventing it or subverting it somehow. Common varieties include timing attacks, which examine the precise amounts of time cryptographic equipment or software takes to perform operations, [...]

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Everybody has probably heard about how the United States shot down a supposedly dangerous satellite with a ship-based kinetic kill interceptor. Now, US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates is saying that this proves missile defence works. Of course, this is absurd. Satellites follow very predictable orbits. As such, it is pretty easy to hit them [...]

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