Saturday, June 30, 2012

How HUMINT saved GEN Washington


In June of 1776 a career criminal and inmate in New York expertly plied British double agents to reveal the secret plans to attack the city. He traded the intel with the Provincial Congress to secure his freedom and saved General Washington from being double crossed by his own bodyguards.
"eight of Washington’s trusty bodyguards were Tories, and they were just days away from kidnapping the famous General."

Gov, invention killer.

From Freakonomics

Drivers Aren’t the Only People With Blind Spots
Math professor R. Andrew Hicks has come up with an amazing new rear-view mirror for the driver’s side of the car that eliminates blind spots. The secret is that standard mirrors are flat, but this one has subtle curves that greatly widens the field of view, but without being distorting. If you look at the photo accompanying the link above, it is amazing how much better the new mirror seems to be.
Alas, you won’t see Hicks’s mirror on many cars any time soon. U.S. regulations require that driver’s side mirrors be flat, and this mirror is not flat. So if you want one, you will have to buy it and install it on the car yourself.
It seems strange to me that the U.S. government is in the business of telling auto makers what shape their mirrors should be. Doesn’t that seem like something that markets can take care of just fine on their own? I can’t think of many good reasons why car makers would opt for a curved mirror if flat mirrors perform better. What is the government trying to protect against? Instead, by having such specific regulations, it will probably be years – if ever – before this great new invention becomes widely available.
My guess it is that is much easier to solve the problem of a driver’s blind spot than to fix this regulatory blind spot.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Flame Cyberweapon

Here is a news roundup from ThreaPost:
"Are the winds of cyber war blowing, or is the newly discovered Flame worm just a tempest in a teapot? Just days after it was disclosed to the public, the Flame worm is fanning the flames of controversy within the security world."

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

UMD Does it Again!



Engineering students at the U of Maryland set a new world record for flying a human-powered helicopter. More at NewScientist.

Monday, June 18, 2012

New Super Computer Champ

Who needs the Olympics with competition this exciting?
With 1.5 million processing cores, Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer weighs about the same as 30 elephants, and it can do more calculations per second than any machine ever built. 
How many? 16.3 quadrillion, according to benchmark numbers researchers at the national lab submitted for international supercomputing benchmarking contest called the Top500 list. In benchmarking terms, that translates to 16.3 petaflops per second. 
That blows away the reigning top supercomputer, Japan’s K computer, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science, which can deliver 10.5 petaflops per second.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Home of the Brave

A Memorial Day article from the Wall Street Journal, 2007:

America's Honor

Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

Comcast Prioritizes Traffic

I knew it!
For a long time, I have suspected that cable providers prioritized their traffic for greater profit. Now it looks like there is some proof that they do.

From GigaOM:
"After two separate blog posts appeared last week showing that Comcast was labeling packets on its network with different quality of service marks, many folks in the industry raised their eyebrows and a few started feeling around for people to conduct reliable tests..."

Why We Serve

This is a late Memorial Day post but worthy nonetheless. The letter was submitted to a local Patch for Memorial Day, by the author's great-niece.

France, Jan. 5, 1945

The College Bubble

This blog post from Mark Cuban made a lot of internet noise recently and was even featured on Freakonomics.  Now that I am finally getting around to posting it, let the hullabaloo begin! (again):
It’s just a matter of time until we see the same meltdown in traditional college education. Like the real estate industry, prices will rise until the market revolts. Then it will be too late. Students will stop taking out the loans traditional Universities expect them to. And when they do tuition will come down. And when prices come down Universities will have to cut costs beyond what they are able to. They will have so many legacy costs, from tenured professors to construction projects to research they will be saddled with legacy costs and debt in much the same way the newspaper industry was. Which will all lead to a de-levering and a de-stabilization of the University system as we know it. 
And it can’t happen fast enough. 
IMHO, the biggest problem the economy has is the enormous student debt new college grads and those leaving college find themselves with. In the past leaving college meant getting a job and getting a used car and/or an apartment with some friends. Yes there was student debt, but it wasn’t any where near your car payment. You could still afford the car and the apartment. Now its the exact opposite. Today, the minute you graduate college you face the challenge of debt against a college education whose value is immediately “underwater”

Friday, June 8, 2012

Gun Control in NYC

I thought this was good.

David Petzal: NY Gun Control: The Mad Hatter Would Understand
One of the most frequent bleats I hear from people who don’t like guns and the people who own them is: “How can you object to any kind of reasonable controls? Why do you fight every law tooth and nail even if it makes sense?” 
Because when you talk about most controls placed on anything by government at any level, “sense” and “reasonable” die agonizing deaths somewhere between the proposal of a law and its actual enforcement. It seemed reasonable after 9/11 to have a more or less efficient group of people keeping terrorists off airplanes. What we got instead was the TSA yanking adult diapers off granny ladies and copping feels from 6-year-olds. 

Video: Freedive to 393ft



Outside article

Army Invents new Battery

To our great surprise, the incredibly large and incredibly bureaucratic Army actually is capable of innovation
"This is what you would call a quantum leap," Cresce said. "We've gone from circling around a certain type of 4 volt energy for quite a while. All of a sudden a whole new class of batteries and voltages are open to us. The door is open that was closed before."

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Video: Michael Lewis Graduation Speech


The award-winning author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball gave the Baccalaureate speech  at Princeton this year (video here). His message, acknowledge your luck and pay for it.
"My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. people really don't like to hear success explained away as luck--especially successful people." 

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Veteran CEOs are better and worse

From Slate:
A study of CEOs who have served in the military finds that companies run by former soldiers are less likely to commit fraud than CEOs who never served. But honesty may come at a cost to shareholders—the same study finds that military CEOs also produce lower returns at the companies they manage.

Smart People are Healthier

telegraph.co.uk
New research finds an association between lower body weight and participation in cultural and intellectual activities, including reading.
~Although time spent reading and time spent watching TV both expend few calories, one is associated with lower weight, and the other with higher weight.
~More highly educated people tend to both read more and weigh less. Perhaps knowledge gained from schooling gives insight into the importance of proper weight for good health.

~the association between BMI and reading and related activity can still be found even after controlling for education and other measures of socioeconomic status.

~But this data suggests you have a better chance of keeping off excess pounds if you indulge in leisure-time interests that have intellectual or emotional weight.

Horses suck at running

dailymail.co.uk
We have covered human running topics before (here, and here) , but this article provides a nice summary of how it all started: "persistence hunting".

Why nearly every sport except long-distance running is fundamentally absurd:
There's no denying it—our kind started substituting brains for brawn long ago, and it shows: We can't begin to compete with animals when it comes to the raw ingredients of athletic prowess...But there is one exception to our general paltriness: We're the right honorable kings and queens of the planet when it comes to long-distance running...
But then it finally happened—in 2004 a British man named Huw Lobb won [the Man vs. Horse distance race]...