Voice recognition technology? In a phone? In Scotland?
Siri, the virtual personal assistant that comes with the new iPhone 4S, is advertised to understand English as she is spoke in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Somebody forgot to tell Apple’s engineers that Scotland is part of the United Kingdom, so the poor electronic lass is mistaking “cheers” for “chairs”… and worse.
They really should have seen this coming.
(Disclaimer: I work for Nokia, which produces phones that compete with the iPhone.)
Getting closer to nature
At some point while researching a story, I came across information on companion planting. One of the suggestions from that page was that plants in the Allium family, including onions, are good to plant with fruit trees, because they deter pests. So when we had a couple of onion bulbs destined for the compost bin, I offered to plant them next to the apple trees in our yard.
I don’t know if they are doing any good for the trees—given everything else in our yard, slugs and aphids are the least of their problems—but since I got to see what the flowering stem of an onion looks like, I can’t say the effort was wasted.
Lambda: the ultimate religion
The Puritans of the colonial era believed in Calvinist theology, which states that God chose who would be saved from eternal damnation, and if He didn’t choose you, nothing you did could change His mind about your fate. In order to join their churches, you had to convince the church elders that you were one of the Elect, which you did by describing your personal conversion experience; this experience proved that God had laid His hand on your soul and brought you into the fold.
Following this hoary tradition, disciples of God’s own programming language have peppered the Internet with their own conversion experiences. Testify, brothers and sisters!
It beats Windows Solitaire
I’m too lazy to chase down the link in the wee hours of the morning, but I remember seeing a presentation by a team from Microsoft, arguing that user interface designers are too constrained by the desire to make everything easily accessible to a naive user. After all, they said, mastering a contemporary video game requires a lot of effort, and yet people are willing to pay for the opportunity to make just such an effort. They concluded that the people who design user interfaces for productivity applications should learn from the people who design video games.
And lo and behold, Microsoft Labs has released a video game to help people learn how to use Office.
Timeless wankery
Sometimes, when technology marches on, it tramples popular culture under its jackboots. For example, I often wonder what people who grew up with e-mail and cellular phones make of Diva, a film in which half the cast chases the other half around looking for surreptitious tape recordings.
But sometimes, an artist recognizes a fundamental truth of human nature that transcends the hardware of the age. Compare Flanders and Swann’s fifty-year-old “Song of Reproduction” with the latest xkcd strip.
Infosec: the early years
As part of my wife’s heroic renovation of our basement, she provided each one of our children with a little cabinet to keep their Lego creations and similar valuables. She screwed a hasp onto each cabinet and gave each child a padlock with a four-letter combination, so that each could secure his valuables against nosy brothers.
Over breakfast, The Six-Year-Old could not resist dropping so many hints about his combination that The Eight-Year-Old guessed it.
The Four-Year-Old told his brothers the combination outright, but this information is now moot, because while the lock was open, he accidentally held the shackle in the position for resetting the combination… and futzed with the dials, so that God only knows what the combination is now… and locked his cabinet.
It sucks to be a predator
And you’ve got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. —Spike
Consider the vampire as a creature bound by the Law of Conservation of Energy.
According to the MadSci Network (how can I not trust these guys?), there are about 700 [kilo]calories in a liter of human blood. A vampire who sucks dry a human adult with five liters of blood is going to get 3,500 calories. One who believes in sustainable humaniculture, drawing at a rate no more than what the Red Cross recommends for whole-blood donors, will get half a liter, i.e., 350 calories, every other month.
So if the vampire needs 3,500 calories a day to sustain his or her undeath (more than the average human adult, but it makes the math easier, and heck, a vampire doesn’t spend all night sitting at a desk), he or she will need to either rotate among six hundred cooperative hosts, or take down one victim every day. In the latter case, even if every victim is consumed after he or she reproduces, and even if vampirism is the only cause of human death, we would need a population of at least ten thousand humans to carry each vampire. By comparison, in the classic study of population dynamics among moose and wolves, the moose-to-wolf ratio ranges from 15–50 moose per wolf.
Moose… hmm. What if we are dealing with emo-pires who refuse, on principle, to feed off another sentient species? It says here that “a 400 kilogram moose has a blood volume of about 32 litres”, so one moose could replace between five and six human hosts; a moose generation is only four or five years, so a stable population of ten thousand humans could be replaced by about a hundred and fifty moose—assuming, crucially, that the vampires would be just as successful at catching the moose as they would be at catching two-legged prey. So Maine’s population of 30,000 moose (according to Wikipedia) could support up to two hundred vampires, while its human population could support only a hundred and thirty.
Regardless of which scenario you choose, given how much impact a single additional vampire has on the food supply, it’s hard to see why any immortal vampire would deliberately turn a human.
If vampire-story authors would pay attention to these questions of population dynamics, they could enrich the genre.
Wanted: digital passports
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, bemoaning how CNN requires you to sign away your digital soul in order to post a comment on its Web site, remarks:
In the United States, we don’t have many laws protecting our personal information. We need more than we have. The alternative, the one we’ll get by default if we don’t do anything, is to have our online identities mediated by Facebook. If the government had proposed an online identity system that prone to holes, leaks, and exploits, we’d have been up in arms.
Which reminds me…
In the Anglo-American legal tradition we’ve always been antsy about government officials saying “papers, please”, but authentication of identity is one of the traditional functions of the state. The paper trail certifying that I really am Seth Gordon, for all transactions where it really counts, terminates in two places: a birth certificate issued by the State of Illinois, and a driver’s license issued by the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. (If I had changed my name since birth, of course, that paper trail would have taken a detour through some probate court.)
The governments of Estonia and Lithuania have brought state-authenticated identity into the digital age with systems that combine a smartcard, a PIN, and the OpenID protocol. (My Web browser cannot authenticate the Web site for Lithuania’s national OpenID provider, which suggests there are a few kinks to be worked out of the system.) Why can’t the United States do the same thing?
For financial and medical transactions, this would create a single strong system for logging into the Web sites of multiple banks, credit-card issuers, and so forth. For non-financial transactions, a government-backed identity broker could authenticate a user by revealing the minimum amount of information that a Web site operator actually needs, rather than the maximum amount that some profit-seeking broker wants to share. The government could protect citizens’ privacy by offering them proxy identities: “account 2b740996-9919-11df-80f3-001aa0739303 is associated with a lawful US resident over the age of eighteen and you don’t need to know anything else about them”. And a Web site that accepted any OpenID-based authentication system could let users certify their identity through LiveJournal, AOL, Google, or any other private provider, so people who didn’t want to involve the government wouldn’t have to.
Obviously no system is perfectly secure, and letting a single agency manage hundreds of millions of digital identities raises the spectre of catastrophic failure. However, I believe that the current way we handle digital identity, juggling dozens of half-remembered usernames and passwords, is even less secure, because none of the institutions managing these databases have a strong incentive to do it right, and an attacker can wreak havoc by simply penetrating whichever system is weakest. The alternative to authentication by the government is not authentication by Bruce Schneier, but authentication by Facebook.
Cool new renewable-energy idea of the month
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a one-megawatt power plant!
via Hacker News
PSA: How to recognize that someone is drowning
The Instinctive Drowning Response… does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening.
If you don’t want to be one of those adults, read the rest.
via kdorian
