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Below are the 25 most recent friends journal entries:| Saturday, July 19th, 2008 | ||||||||||
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tamedknee | Last minute plans are awful. My sister has double booked herself leaving me in an uncomfortable position for tomorrow. Not enough hours in the day to do things I wanted to do + things I needed to do (like wade through the 4 months of mail) - which were the things I ended up not doing.
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petranef |
Dr. Horrible Act III ( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. ) Current Mood: sad | |||||||||
phdcomic |
07/18/08 PHD comic: 'I wonder what's going on today'
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petranef |
Hee! ( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. ) Current Mood: anticipatory | |||||||||
scienceblog |
Studies refute myths of obese in the workplace New research led by a Michigan State University scholar refutes commonly held stereotypes that overweight workers are lazier, more emotionally unstable and harder to get along with than their "normal weight" colleagues. | |||||||||
bruce_schneier |
Friday Squid Blogging: Researching the Reproductive Habits of Giant Squids I sure want to know more: Giants have very strange sexual behaviour where the male has a metre-long muscular penis that he uses a bit like a nail gun and shoots cords of sperm under the skin of the female's arms and she carries the sperm around with her until she is ready to lay her big jelly mass of a million eggs. | |||||||||
neo_rowen |
A day in the life of Gunn 845am: Wake up groggy 930am: Get to work late after Steve decided to delay me 945am: Person dropped off server pc at shop 15min before close last night (515pm, though due to next customer I was at work till about 630pm. I hope his laptop explodes.) anyway said person who dropped off server calls to find out if it's done. I try to politely till him it will take all day instead of goto hell it's been here essentially not even an hour. 1000am: Attempt to find a way to recover data from a broken Raid 5 array when I have no raid controller in shop. Method found. Was complicated, won't bore you all with the details but it was some fine jury rigging. Estimated time to completion: 6-7 hrs. Day passes smoothly on, not to many idiots or much to do at work. 400pm: Call the court, again. After speaking directly to one of the clerks Monday (and pointing out it's been 3 weeks) magically my paperwork has been processed and completed. 415pm: Server owner calls to check status. Not done, data recovery will be done in 30min. 420pm: Server owner calls again to check status. Apparently he has a difference sense of time. I consider just holding the phone up to the 4 raid drives rigged into my test machine like some sort of Borg parasite so he can cheer it on or something. 430pm: Calls again, his new name is now asshat. 445pm: Data recovery finish, copied his stupid SQL database to a cd and leave work so I can get home and moonlight on a friend's technical service call. Working on helpign him with calls as a small second job for extra cash. 520pm: Home, cleaned up and off to on site technical call. 545pm: Told older woman her HD is screwed, politely. Eric will make a new appointment and bring it to her. 615pm: Home, eat dinner, run errands. 800pm: Be online for event in EQ2 I signed up for. 1050pm: Event ran really late, run lik ehell two blocks to get in line for midnight premier of Dark Knight. 0000am: Watch Dark Knight. For some god awful reason the single preview they show before Dark Knight was Mamma Mia. There was people in the audience dressed as the Joker, makeup and all. NOT exactly your Mamma Mia target audience. 0230am: Movie done, there's nothing after the credit so don't bother staying. 0300am: Home, Steve wakes up. 0400am: Finally get to sleep. Long Day. Very long day. Was groggy this morning but fairly functional now. Tonight have a concert at the local concert hall, performing video game themes like Halo and Final Fantasy. Something to do right? Next week I think Steve wants to go see the local MD soccer team play. I can't imagine why he'd want to see american soccer but whatever... location: Baltimore - Work | |||||||||
bruce_schneier |
Funny Radio Skit on Identity Theft By Mitchell & Webb. | |||||||||
scienceblog |
Cancer researchers call for ethnicity to be taken into account Breast cancer research needs to investigate how a person's ethnicity influences their response to treatment and its outcome, according to a new Comment piece in today's Lancet (18 July) by researchers from Imperial College London. | |||||||||
lankyguy |
The Dark Knight ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. ) Current Mood: | |||||||||
bruce_schneier |
Midazolam as a Non-Lethal Weapon Did you know that, in some jurisdictions, police can inject midazolam into suspects to subdue them? "There is no research guideline. There is no validated protocol for this. There's not even a clear set of indications for when this is to be used except when people are agitated. By saying that it's done by the emergency medical personnel, they basically are trying to have it both ways. That is, they’re trying to use a medical protocol that is not validated, not for a police function, arrest and detention," Miles said. The biggest side effect is amnesia, which makes it harder for any defendent to defend himself in court. | |||||||||
tedblog |
How fish talk -- and how we do
Linking two TEDTalks fascinations -- language and fish -- is this report from today's Science. While studying midshipman fish that grunt and hum, two neurobiologists have found the basic brain wiring that, they think, evolved into human speech. It points to a common ancestor among all of us vertebrates who vocalize. From Science Now: Andrew Bass, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, has been studying the midshipman's vocal habits for more than a decade. Recently, he and two colleagues mapped out the neural circuitry that controls the fish's soundmaking. They found that a set of rhythmically firing neurons control the fish's vocal muscles and the pitch and duration of its calls. And by tracking the brain development of larval fish, they discovered that the neurons grow at the base of the hindbrain and the upper part of the spinal cord. Read the full story on Science Now -- and hear the sound of the midshipman fish in a video narrated by Andrew Bass. Or see the BBC story, with even more video >> | |||||||||
dinosaurcomics |
dinosaur comics, ladies and gentlemen!
July 15th, 2008: Hey I'm thinking of coming out with some new shirts! If you've read something in my comic and you've said to yourself, "MAN I wish I could spend money on that!" why not email me? That way if I get a thousand emails saying MAKE A SHIRT THAT SAYS "WHOAH, CHECK OUT THESE GENITALS" then I'll know you're all crazy. Crazy prescient!
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tedblog |
Brain magic: Keith Barry on TED.com First, magician Keith Barry shows us how our brains can fool our bodies -- in a trick that works via podcast too. Then he involves the audience in some jaw-dropping (and even a bit dangerous) feats of brain magic. (Recorded February 2004 in Monterey, California. Duration: 19:49.)
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hpana |
'Half-Blood Prince' IMAX teaser now online Just in case you are one of the few who won't be going to see the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight," in an IMAX theatre this weekend, you can now view the 15-second teaser trailer we told you about previously for "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" on YouTube. | |||||||||
scienceblog |
Bullying-suicide link Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have found signs of an apparent connection between bullying, being bullied and suicide in children, according to a new review of studies from 13 countries published in the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health. | |||||||||
scienceblog |
Saharan dust storms sustain life in Atlantic Ocean Research at the University of Liverpool has found how Saharan dust storms help sustain life over extensive regions of the North Atlantic Ocean. | |||||||||
bruce_schneier |
TrueCrypt's Deniable File System Together with Tadayoshi Kohno, Steve Gribble, and three of their students at the University of Washington, I have a new paper that breaks the deniable encryption feature of TrueCrypt version 5.1a. Basically, modern operating systems leak information like mad, making deniability a very difficult requirement to satisfy. ABSTRACT: We examine the security requirements for creating a Deniable File System (DFS), and the efficacy with which the TrueCrypt disk-encryption software meets those requirements. We find that the Windows Vista operating system itself, Microsoft Word, and Google Desktop all compromise the deniability of a TrueCrypt DFS. While staged in the context of TrueCrypt, our research highlights several fundamental challenges to the creation and use of any DFS: even when the file system may be deniable in the pure, mathematical sense, we find that the environment surrounding that file system can undermine its deniability, as well as its contents. Finally, we suggest approaches for overcoming these challenges on modern operating systems like Windows. The students did most of the actual work. I helped with the basic ideas, and contributed the threat model. Deniability is a very hard feature to achieve. There are several threat models against which a DFS could potentially be secure: Since we wrote our paper, TrueCrypt released version 6.0 of its software, which claims to have addressed many of the issues we've uncovered. In the paper, we said: We analyzed the most current version of TrueCrypt available at the writing of the paper, version 5.1a. We shared a draft of our paper with the TrueCrypt development team in May 2008. TrueCrypt version 6.0 was released in July 2008. We have not analyzed version 6.0, but observe that TrueCrypt v6.0 does take new steps to improve TrueCrypt’s deniability properties (e.g., via the creation of deniable operating systems, which we also recommend in Section 5). We suggest that the breadth of our results for TrueCrypt v5.1a highlight the challenges to creating deniable file systems. Given these potential challenges, we encourage the users not to blindly trust the deniability of such systems. Rather, we encourage further research evaluating the deniability of such systems, as well as research on new yet light-weight methods for improving deniability. So we cannot break the deniability feature in TrueCrypt 6.0. But, honestly, I wouldn't trust it. There have been two news articles (and a SlashDot thread) about the paper. One talks about a generalization to encrypted partitions. If you don't encrypt the entire drive, there is the possibility -- and it seems very probable -- that information about the encrypted partition will leak onto the unencrypted rest of the drive. Whole disk encryption is the smartest option. Our paper will be presented at the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec '08). I've written about deniability before. | |||||||||
wondermark |
#426; In which a Tree gets the Talk I like this Flickr set of iconic photographs recreated in LEGO. | |||||||||
| Thursday, July 17th, 2008 | ||||||||||
scienceblog |
From humming fish to Puccini: Vocal communication evolved with ancient species It's a long way from the dull hums of the amorous midshipman fish to the strains of a Puccini aria – or, alas, even to the simplest Celine Dion melody. But the neural circuitry that led to the human love song – not to mention birdsongs, frog thrums and mating calls of all manner of vertebrates – was likely laid down hundreds of millions of years ago with the hums and grunts of the homely piscine. | |||||||||
scienceblog |
Russian antihistamine shows promise treating Alzheimer's A drug once approved as an antihistamine in Russia improved thinking processes and ability to function in patients with Alzheimer's disease in a study conducted there, said an expert at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal The Lancet. | |||||||||
xkcd_rss |
Impostor
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hpana |
Update: New hi-res still of Slughorn and Harry in 'HBP' Thanks to "Entertainment Weekly" for letting us know that in tomorrow's issue of the magazine a new picture from "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" will appear. The new image shows Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Prof. Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) in a classroom. UPDATE: Warner Bros. has provided us a high-res version. | |||||||||
scienceblog |
Single Boulder May Prove that Antarctica and North America Were Once Connected A lone granite boulder found against all odds high atop a glacier in Antarctica may provide additional key evidence to support a theory that parts of the southernmost continent once were connected to North America hundreds of millions of years ago. | |||||||||
scienceblog |
EPA Releases Report on Climate Change and Health The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a report that discusses the potential impacts of climate change on human health, human welfare, and communities in the U.S. | |||||||||
bored
amused
