March 2008

The Toronto Star has reported that: “No gasoline-powered car assembled in North America would meet China’s current fuel-efficiency standard.” Even the proposed tougher Californian standards - the ones about which there is a big fight with the Environmental Protection Agency - will not do so. In the United States, there is a proposal to require [...]

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One odd tendency I have noticed is the frequency with which popular science magazines contain ads for very dubious products and services: often, precisely the sort you would expect the scientifically knowledgeable to shun. Looking through this month’s Scientific American there are ads for ’stress erasing’ gizmos, a machine that supposedly makes you fit and [...]

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I first experienced Jhonen Vasquez’s work in the form of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac: a darkly comic feature of my high-school days. Johnny is insane and believes he needs to keep a wall in his house painted with fresh blood so that demons do not push through from the other side. On the basis of [...]

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I have previously written about one-way hash functions and their importance for cryptography. Recapping briefly, hash functions take some data (a password, a picture, a file, etc) and pass it through a mathematical algorithm. This produces an output with two special features. First, it should be very difficult to find two pieces of data that [...]

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Rather than phoning in some more dull posts, I am going to let things be here for the rest of the long weekend. I hope you are all finding ways to enjoy it.

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