Geek stuff – Page 115 – a sibilant intake of breath

A tempting camera

I seem to have stumbled across a camera that is, in many ways, ideal for me: the Ricoh GR Digital. My reasons, in roughly decreasing order of importance:

28mm is my favourite focal length; it provides the perspective that comes most naturally to me when composing images. It is as wide as my best SLR lens goes, and I almost invariably use the widest focal length on my A570IS. Having a prime lens means (a) more light hitting the sensor and (b) potentially sharper images.
The camera is versatile in terms of aspect ratios: with options for 4:3 (standard digicam), 3:2 (standard film), and 1:1.
The camera is small enough to carry around, unlike a digital SLR.
The camera is made of metal. (An advantage provided the weight is tolerable.)
The camera can shoot in RAW format

That being said, it does seem a bit strange to spend $700 on a fixed-lens point and shoot camera when you can get a DSLR kit (something like the Digital Rebel XT) for a couple hundred more dollars. The DSLR is far more versatile and capable overall. That being said, my Elan 7N has spent the last year gaining dust in its case; my point and shoot digicam, by comparison, basically only leaves my side when I am in the shower.

Electoral statistics

This website presents the 2008 American Presidential election, as represented by an expert in baseball statistics. At this time, the message seems to be that Clinton has a better chance of beating McCain than Obama, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. This election has already repeatedly confounded early polls and conventional wisdom. A lot will happen before November.

Ottawa Coolness Assessment I

During my ten months in Ottawa, I have had significant difficulty identifying aspects of the city that might be considered cool. Thankfully, someone much cooler than me is in the city and willing to conduct an authoritative evaluation. Below is an awkward combination of a United Nations Security Council resolution and terms of reference for a contractor:

Date: 27 May 2008

Preamble:

Appreciating that Ottawa is the capital of Canada and a significant city within Canada.

Acknowledging that capital cities and significant cities are centres of arts and culture.

Recognizing that Milan Ilnyckyj has failed to find evidence thereof up to the present date.

Hereby resolves that:

A special rapporteur shall be appointed to identify what, if any, artistic or cultural merit is possessed by the city of Ottawa.

The rapporteur shall devote a minimum of one hour per day to this task.

The investigation conducted shall continue for one month past this date unless specifically authorized to do otherwise.

The rapporteur appointed to this task is to be Emily Rachel Horn originally of Surrey, British Columbia.

Signed: Emily Horn, Milan Ilnyckyj

We shall see what she produces in the course of her official duties.

Net neutrality

Today, there is a rally on Parliament Hill in favour of net neutrality. Basically, these people are arguing that internet and telephone companies should not sift through the kind of data their customers are using: designating some for the fast stream and letting some linger or vanish.

In general, I am very supportive of the idea of net neutrality. On the one hand, this is because packet filtering has creepy privacy and surveillance issues associated with it. On the other, it recognizes that established companies will usually do whatever they can to strangle innovative competitors. Without net neutrality, its a fair bet that we would never have had Skype or the World Wide Web.

At the same time, there are legitimate issues about bandwidth. There are people out there exchanging many gigabytes a day worth of movies, music, and games. I am not too concerned with piracy and intellectual property, but that traffic is a real strain on the network and a burden to others. It pushes up costs for everyone as ordinary users subsidize excessive ones.

The best solution seems to be to allow bandwidth capping but disallow packet filtering. That way, sending a terabyte a month of illegally copied films will be restricted, but Skype-like new services will continue to emerge and there will be fewer general opportunites for telecom companies to abuse.

I cannot go to the rally myself, since I will be at work, but I would encourage those who are free and feeling a bit activist to attend.

Multiple anagramming

The process of cryptanalysis can be greatly simplified if one possesses more than one message encrypted with the same key. One especially important technique is multiple anagramming. Indeed, it may be the only way to decipher two or more messages that have been enciphered using a one time pad.

The basic idea of multiple anagramming is that you can use one message to guess what possible keys might be, then use another message to check whether it might be correct. For instance, imagine we have these two messages and think they were enciphered using the Vigenere cipher:

SGEBVYAUZUYKRQLBCGKEFONNKNSMFRHULSQ
TUEEDAKHNVKUEOICHKIEPOHRIFDQSPHGEGQ

Now, suppose we think the first message might be addressed to Derek, Sarah, or Steve.

Using words we think the message might start with, we can guess at a key. If the first word is DEREK, the key would start with ‘PCNXL’. If the first word is SARAH, the key would start with ‘AGNBO’. Finally, if the first word is STEVE, the key would start with ‘ANAGR’. Here, the key is a bit of a clue. Normally, there would be no easy way to tell from one message whether we had found the correct key or not.

We can then test those keys against the second message. The first key yields ‘ESRHS’ for the first five letters. The second, ‘TORDP’. The third yields ‘THEYM’. The third looks the most promising. Through either guessing or testing further letters, we can discover that the key is ‘ANAGRAM’. The second message is thus ‘THEYMAYHAVEDECIPHEREDOURCODESCHANGE.’ Having two ciphertexts that produce sensible plaintexts from the same key suggests that we have properly identified the cipher and key being used. We can then easily decipher any other messages based on the same combination.

Towel Day 2008

It is Towel Day, once again. Those truly wishing to pay their respects to the comic genius of Douglas Adams should consider reading his relatively little known but excellent book Last Chance to See.

Hofmann’s ‘problem child’

As an additional offering to see readers through my canoe-induced absence, here is an interesting article from The New York Times about lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) – the ‘problem child’ of Albert Hofmann. It includes a description of his remarkable first experiences, when experimenting with the medical potential of ergot derivatives, as well as his later observations and reflections upon the molecule he introduced to the world.

Hofmann, who died last week, has an obituary in The Economist. It takes a somewhat interesting position: essentially, that LSD was a promising chemical that ended up universally banned because of the excesses of Timothy Leary and company.

Destroying Iraqi RADAR in 1991

Anyone who has been trawling the internet in a search for information on the suppression of air defences during the first Gulf War might be well served by this article. In particular, it goes into a lot of detail about the location, identification, targeting, and destruction of Iraqi RADAR installations using weapons like the American AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) and the British ALARM (Air Launched Anti-Radiation Missile). The article highlights how the use of Soviet equipment by Iraq made this a kind of test situation for NATO versus Warsaw Pact air defence and attack equipment.

What this suggests is that the NATO-Warpac central European air battle would have probably followed a similar course, leading to the defeat of the Communists’ IADS within a week or so, in turn leading to air superiority in the following week, as the Communist air forces would have withered under the fire of the Allied counter-air campaign. Fortunately this never had to happen and the world has been spared the inevitable nuclear response to the lost air battle and hence total conventional defeat through attrition by air.

Not a very comforting conclusion for the world at large, though no doubt gratifying for all the companies that built American planes and missiles and things.

One interesting tactic was the use of Brunswick Tactical Air Launched Decoys. These simulated the appearance of incoming aircraft, causing Iraqi RADAR installations to ‘light up’ in order to target them. Sometimes, they would draw fire from surface-to-air missile batteries. Often, this would leave the former temporarily defenceless at a time when their position – and that of their supporting RADAR – had been revealed. Both could then be targeted by NATO aircraft. The ruse was apparently so effective that the Iraqi armed forces maintained the false belief that they had destroyed several hundred British and American planes.

There is also a fair bit of information about jamming and other forms of electronic countermeasures. All in all, it provides an interesting glimpse back into a period when conventional warfare against standing armies was something NATO still did.

Nanotubes and hot sauces

Hot sauce aficionados may be familiar with the Scoville Scale, used to express the heat of a sauce or pepper. The other day, my friend Antonia sent me an article explaining that the process of determining a Scoville rating might be significantly refined, thanks to carbon nanotubes:

The well-established Scoville method – currently the industry standard – involves diluting a sample until five trained taste testers cannot detect any heat from the chilli. The number of dilutions is called the Scoville rating; the relatively mild Jalapeño ranges from around 2,500-8,000, whereas the hottest chilli in the world, the ‘Naga Jolokia’, has a rating of 1,000,000. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) can also be used but this requires bulky, expensive equipment and detailed analysis of the capsaicinoids.

In Compton’s method, the capsaicinoids are adsorbed onto multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) electrodes. The team measures the current change as the capsaicinoids are oxidised by an electrochemical reaction, and this reading can be translated into Scoville units. The technique is called adsorptive stripping voltammetry (ASV), and is a relatively simple electrochemical method.

The Scoville Scale is pretty easy to understand. A sauce with a rating of 1000 can be diluted 1:1 with water to produce a sauce with a rating of 500. Tabasco sauce, of the sort ubiquitous in diners, has a rating of between 2,500 and 5,000. Dave’s Insanity Sauce – the spiciest one in my kitchen – has a rating of about 180,000. Even taking the upper estimate of Tabasco’s potency, that means one tablespoon of Dave’s is equivalent to about half a litre of Tabasco.

Of course, those who truly wish for their epithelial cells to signal as much heat and abrasion as is theoretically possible can do better. Blair’s 16 Million Reserve, which consists of a little bottle of pure capsaicin crystals, weighs in at 16,000,000 Scoville heat units. One tablespoon is thus akin to 1.31 litres of Dave’s Insanity Sauce, or 47.16 litres of Tabasco. Just the thing you need if you want to turn a bland chili dinner for your million person standing army into something a bit more interesting.

Category: Geek stuff