Friday, February 28, 2003

Probability 1

In a universe infinitely large, what is the probability of intelligent life on another planet? Sounds like a trick question, but for anyone versed in cosmology and statistics, the answer is 1; that is, there must be life on at least one other planet in the universe. This is Amir Aczels theorem. But, as physicist Enrico Fermi once asked, if thats true, where is everyone? Aczel tackles that paradox after he goes through the statistical calculations for the probability of intelligent life, considering factors such as how many stars are in a galaxy, how many of those stars might be hospitable, how many might have planets, and how many planets might have environments suitable to support life as we know it (or as we dont). Aczel also provides an overview of the relevant developments in astronomy and biology--laying the groundwork to show that the universes chemistry must add up to life. Whether life was spread through the universe by chunks of debris like ALH84001--the enigmatic meteorite from Mars that contained tantalizing hints of the possibility of life--or arose independently, Aczel is sure it is out there. After teasing readers with scientific history, Probability 1 delivers on its promise to prove Aczels conjecture through a clearly explained application of known statistical theory to the chaos of the universe.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0156010801/qid=1071781566/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-3718184-0325549?v=glance&s=books

Loop Quantum Gravity

Its only since the middle 1980s that real progress began to be made on unifying relativity and quantum theory. The turning point was the invention of not one but two approaches: loop quantum gravity and string theory. Since then, we have been making steady progress on both of these approaches. In each case, we are able to do calculations that predict surprising new phenomena. Still, we are not done. Neither is yet in final form; there are still things to understand. But the really important news is that there is now a real chance of doing experiments that will test the new predictions of these theories.This is important, because were in the uncomfortable situation of having two well-developed candidates for the quantum theory of gravity. We need to reduce these to one theory. We can do this either by finding that one is wrong and the other right, or by finding that the two theories can themselves be unified.
Its only since the middle 1980s that real progress began to be made on unifying relativity and quantum theory. The turning point was the invention of not one but two approaches: loop quantum gravity and string theory. Since then, we have been making stea

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Bagdads Batteries

War can destroy more than a people, an army or a leader. Culture, tradition and history also lie in the firing line. Iraq has a rich national heritage. The Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel are said to have been sited in this ancient land. In any war, there is a chance that priceless treasures will be lost forever, articles such as the "ancient battery" that resides defenceless in the museum of Baghdad. For this object suggests that the region, whose civilizations gave us writing and the wheel, may also have invented electric cells - two thousand years before such devices were well known.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2804257.stm

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

More Microsoft Spyware

The Inquirer is reporting that a group in Germany has deciphered the information sent to Microsoft during an update using Windows Update and says that information on all software installed on your computer is sent, even that which is not Microsofts own software.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/26/1320231&mode=thread&tid=109&tid=158

Time Not Quantized

The conclusion that time is not quantized poses large problems for scientists. According to Lieu, "The Big Bang theory supposes that at the instant of creation, the quantum singularity that became the universe would need to have infinite density and temperature. To avoid that sticky problem, theorists invoked the Planck time. They said if the instant of creation was also a quantum event, when space and time were both blurry, then you dont need infinite density and temperature at the start of the Big Bang." Without quantum time, the universe becomes mathematically uglier at the moment of its inception. Like so many maps that were supposed to lead to the Holy Grail, our notions of quantized time have failed to lead us to a unified quantum theory.
http://www.astronomy.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/001/219fcvov.asp

Monday, February 24, 2003

Nethack 3.4.1 Released

The NetHack DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of NetHack 3.4.1. NetHack 3.4 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack. It is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.3.
http://nethack.sourceforge.net/v341/downloads.html

New StrongBad Email


http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail64.html

Thursday, February 20, 2003

Phantom Debit Withdrawls

We present an attack on hardware security modules used by retail banks for the secure storage and verification of customer PINs in ATM (cash machine) infrastructures. By using adaptive decimalisation tables and guesses, the maximum amount of information is learnt about the true PIN upon each guess. It takes an average of 15 guesses to determine a four digit PIN using this technique, instead of the 5000 guesses intended. In a single 30 minute lunch-break, an attacker can thus discover approximately 7000 PINs rather than 24 with the brute force method. With a $300 withdrawal limit per card, the potential bounty is raised from $7200 to $2.1 million and a single motivated attacker could withdraw $30{50 thousand of this each day. This attack thus presents a serious threat to bank security.
http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

The New Nature vs. Nurture

Ever since Hobbes and Rousseau started riffing on the state of nature and the noble savage a few centuries back, the nature versus nurture debate has been as much about politics as empirical research. Sure, scientists have their genome projects and their twin studies, and they talk a nice game about how extroversion or smoking is "20 percent heritable." But most people dont choose sides because the data convinced them; they lean one way or the other because their political views led them there - the patina of science just makes the biases easier to hide.Which team are you on? Figuring that out used to be easy. Conservatives believed in the power of nature. If you rose to the pinnacle of society or sunk to its depths, you had only yourself to thank or condemn. Society, much less big government, couldnt change your fate. Liberals, on the other hand, saw nurture in everything: The idea of human nature was itself proclaimed an ideological fiction, a blame-the-victim lie dreamed up by racists and imperialists to justify oppression. Historical conditions, not biology, determined your station in life. Society made you, and if you didnt like who you saw in the mirror, better to remake society.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/start.html?pg=2

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Mars Has Water (Again)

Images from the visible light camera on NASAs Mars Odyssey spacecraft, combined with images from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), suggest melting snow is the likely cause of the numerous eroded gullies first documented on Mars by the Mars Orbiting Camera in 2000 by the MGS orbiter.The now-famous Martian gullies were created by trickling water from melting snow packs, not underground springs or pressurized flows, as has been previously suggested, argues Dr. Philip Christensen, the principal investigator for Odysseys camera system and a Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. He proposes gullies are carved by water melting and flowing beneath snow packs, where it is sheltered from rapid evaporation in the planets thin atmosphere. His paper is in the electronic February 19 issue of Nature.Looking at an image of an impact crater in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars, Christensen noted eroded gullies on the craters cold, pole-facing northern wall and immediately next to them a section of what he calls "pasted-on terrain." Such unique terrain represents a smooth deposit of material that Mars researchers have concluded is "volatile" (composed of materials that evaporate in the thin Mars atmosphere), because it characteristically occurs only in the coldest, most sheltered areas. The most likely composition of this slowly evaporating material is snow. Christensen suspected a special relationship between the gullies and the snow.
http://www.nasa.gov/HP_news_03075.html

Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Mounting Evidence For Extra Dimensions

The concept of extra dimensions, dismissed as nonsense even by one of its earliest proponents nearly nine decades ago, may soon help solve seemingly unrelated problems in particle physics, cosmology and gravitational physics, according to a panel of experts who will assemble from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Feb. 15 (Saturday) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Denver. "It doesnt happen often that you get a confluence of ideas and experiments that come together and its something that obviously would change your whole way of looking at the universe," said one of the panelists, Joseph Lykken, Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago and a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Even though scientists lack direct evidence of extra dimensions, "we have a number of hints from experiments and theoretical ideas that make us think theyre probably out there. Thats why were so excited about looking for them," Lykken said. On the theoretical side, string theory, developed over the past two decades, requires that space-time has extra dimensions if it is to include gravity. "Its just built into the way that string theory works," Lykken said. Experiments, meanwhile, have produced the standard model of physics to describe the most elementary particles and the forces that hold them together. Physicists have come to suspect that something is missing from the standard model.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=10783

Thursday, February 13, 2003

Interview With Marc Andreessen

WN: If you were to design Mosaic again, what would you do differently?

Andreessen: If I had to do it over again, Id probably show some sort of graphical representation of a tree, so you could see what path youre traveling on and could backtrack. Id also include thumbnail renderings on the tree to show where youd been.

WN: Have you seen much recent innovation by others in browser technology?

Andreessen: There was a huge amount of browser development from 1993 to 1998, then nothing much happened from 1998 to 2002. Now, theres a huge number of people doing all kinds of things and youve got real innovation going on.


http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57661,00.html

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

File Sharing Isnt Killing CD Sales -- The Music Industry Is

theres the question of whether the industry reflects popular taste. At the height of the economic bubble, the labels made millions off the bubblegum music craze. In 2000, pop queen Brittany Spears alone sold 7.89 million albums. And that earned her the No. 3 spot on the charts, after rapper Eminem, and her then-boyfriend Justin Timberlakes group, NSync, which sold 9.93 million albums. In 2002, Michael Jacksons Invincible "bombed," selling only 2 million copies. "The industry hasnt yet found anything new to catch the publics imagination," says Rolling Stones Brackett.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2003/tc20030213_9095_tc078.htm

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Current Read: Crypto

If the National Security Agency (NSA) had wanted to make sure that strong encryption would reach the masses, it couldnt have done much better than to tell the cranky geniuses of the world not to do it. Author Steven Levy, deservedly famous for his enlightening Hackers, tells the story of the cypherpunks, their foes, and their allies in Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government. From the determined research of Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman, in the face of the NSAs decades-old security lock, to the commercial worlds turn-of-the-century embrace of encrypted e-commerce, Levy finds drama and intellectual challenge everywhere he looks. Although he writes, "Behind every great cryptographer, it seems, there is a driving pathology," his respect for the mathematicians and programmers who spearheaded public key encryption as the solution to Information Age privacy invasion shines throughout. Even the governmental bad guys are presented more as hapless control fetishists who lack the prescience to see the inevitability of strong encryption as more than a conspiracy of evil.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00007E9RT/qid=1045079492/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-6218073-8322209

Thursday, February 6, 2003

Gibsons New Book Reviewed

What Gibson gives us is an international spy thriller comparable to the slightly skewed tales of Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. His storys central McGuffin is a fragmentary, workstation-rendered romance movie known simply as The Footage. It consists of 100-odd supernally beautiful snippets of video that someone has anonymously posted on the Web. A rabid online cult has grown around the flick, and a Belgian advertising exec (with the improbable name of Hubertus Bigend) hires Cayce Pollard to find the maker. Bigends goal: Tap into The Footages primo street cred strategy for profit. The gig isnt unusual for a professional "cool hunter" like Pollard. Her job is to walk around cities, spot new trends, and advise advertising agencies and marketeers how best to commodify them. Indeed, shes so good at her job that shes literally allergic (read: fainting spells and sneezing fits) to overexposed trademarks. She can be reduced to jelly by a drawing of the Michelin Man. She clips the labels off all her clothes, even going so far as to grind down the Levis logo on the metal buttons of her 501s. Mickey Mouse is just this side of tolerable. Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition - the books acronym is PR, after all. Pollard "knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on." But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. Its one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/play.html?pg=9

Wednesday, February 5, 2003

US Plans To Invade Canada -- In 1920

U.S. plans to invade Canada after the First World War? This is one of the most bizarre stories Ive come across on the Internet, and the most bizarre part is that its true. The U.S. military really did develop a "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan--Red" in the 1920s and 30s, and it really did include provisions for an invasion of Canada by the United States. The document was declassified in 1974, so this isnt really a new story, but there has been some hoopla about it lately. Concerns in some quarters notwithstanding, the whole thing was just a theoretical exercise in military planning. The brass would have made better use of their resources planning for a war with Germany, but that wasnt politically expedient. They reasoned that planning for unlikely wars was better than no planning at all. War Plan Red was never intended to be put into action except in the event of a war with the United Kingdom, an eventuality that everyone would agree was highly unlikely after about 1900. In the color codes used at that time, "Red" referred not to Canada (that was "Crimson"), but to the United Kingdom. The proposed invasion of Canada wasnt an end in itself; it was just the easiest way to hurt the U.K. The plan called for quickly seizing the key port of Halifax to prevent British resupply; cutting communication between eastern and western Canada by capturing Winnipeg; securing bridgeheads near Buffalo, Detroit, and Sault Ste. Marie; and attacking Quebec overland from New England. If everything went according to plan, the U.S. military hoped to take the Great Lakes region and St. Lawrence valley before moving on the prairies and British Columbia. Later when U.S. naval forces were built up, they might be able to take Bermuda and Britains Caribbean possessions on the road toward victory.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mcanadawar.html?

Project Orion

Project Orion was an effort to develop a rocket propulsion system using successive explosions of small nuclear bombs. Project engineers hoped this nuclear "pulse" concept could provide extremely fast and powerful propulsion for human exploration of the planets. The project was initiated by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1958 and cancelled in 1965.
http://www.nasm.si.edu/nasm/dsh/artifacts/RM-ORION.htm

Tuesday, February 4, 2003

Mitnitcks Q&A

Any accounts that were used by me had been dormant for at least three months. I changed the password to the account and shared it with other hackers. I overlooked checking cron for any scheduled scripts that were looking for disk hogs. We were discovered after a user was notified via a cron process that complained about our excessive disk usage. At the time, we didnt really care because the Well only contained a backup of the information we had stored. The same files were mirrored on several sites in the Netherlands, among others, that Shimomura and the FBI had never found. (No, I dont have any copies.)While accessing the Well, I was carefree because my location was masked through many other computer systems and the cellular telecommunications network. I could have taken precautions by installing a covert backdoor to avoid the typical UNIX accounting and logging, but I didnt bother. To avoid any traps and traces, I routinely compromised the local exchange carriers and cellular providers to gain access to their switches. Even if my connection was identified, I routed my data calls in a certain way that was very difficult to track in a reasonable amount of time. In one report, Shimomura had claimed that he and the FBI were unsuccessful at tracing any calls to the point of origin, but were only able to identify the cellular carrier.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/04/2233250&mode=thread&tid=103&tid=123&tid=172

Nuclear Powerd Space Probes

Putting radioactive uranium aboard a spaceship may not seem like the most sensible move after Saturdays shuttle tragedy. But thats exactly what NASA plans to do. And experts in the space community are applauding the agency for the effort. NASA has earmarked $279 million for 2004 -- and $3 billion over the next five years -- for its nuclear efforts, collectively known as Project Prometheus. The centerpiece of the program: developing a nuclear-powered, electric engine that will put an unmanned probe in orbit around three of Jupiters moons sometime after 2011. But Prometheus is more than a one-time exploratory effort, experts said. With its use of nuclear power, it is the critical first step in detailing the solar systems outer reaches -- and, eventually, in sending people to other planets.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,57555,00.html

Sunday, February 2, 2003

NASA: Acute Heat Spike on Shuttle

NASA officials said Sunday that space shuttle Columbia experienced a sudden and extreme rise in temperature on the fuselage moments before the craft broke apart. NASA space shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore said the temperature rise -- 60 degrees over five minutes in the mid-fuselage -- was followed by an increased sign of drag that caused the shuttles computerized flight control system to try to make an adjustment to the flight pattern. Dittemore cautioned that the evidence was still preliminary, but that one of the possibilities was that there been damage or a loss of thermal tiles that protect the shuttle from burning up during re-entry into the Earths atmosphere. "We are making progress," Dittemore said, adding that the combination of new engineering data and an observer who reported seeing debris from the shuttle while it was still passing over California may create "a path that may lead us to the cause."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,57524,00.html

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