Current
Earlier
Later
Archive
 

Home
Search
Mail
Stuff
 

2004.01.18 : 2004.01.24

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Blab. A reader asks us to ...

Tell us your stories about Captain Kangaroo.  I remember him so fondly.  And Mr. Greenjeans and that funny bunny.  What was his name?

So sad to lose him today.  I am sad.

Instead, we celebrate finding, at long last, the Banana Man on the Web, including his haunting song and him "playing" the clarinet. Some long-unused neurons of ours fired off in resonance.

And that is, we think, about as good as one can hope. There is no eternal permanence in the universe. We all die. Everything rusts. Gene lines fade way. Stars go out. Heat death. 

But, if you can be remembered, perhaps you have some small, temporary place in it all.

Blab. A spammist writes:

Subj: Need to host child porn, illegal content, Spam advert site 

Need to host child porn, illegal content, Spam advert site? Try [URL deleted] you will be able to host anything you desire. [...]

Our site will be usefull for the those who want to wash their money also :) (If you don't want to pay taxes or you need to buy something illegal like weapons or drugs).

How unlikely! We wonder what it's really about.

Blab. A wacky Christian advertises ...

Wacky Christian Shirts:

You can get this one for just under 17 Golden Calves (unintentional irony include free of charge).

Perfect for both Christians and nerds.

Newly hatched chick commands you to stop abortion.

And so on, and so forth...

Somehow, we don't see this becoming a fashion trend. At least, not around these parts.

Blab. A reader suggests a ...

possible helenism from  my music teacher-

blink of a gnats eye

ok, so google does recognise it but i'm sure its wrong

We got in the blink of an eye. We're not sure about the other constituent phrase, though. Google has lots of references to gnat's eye. Is it smaller than a gnat's eye? Tell us.

Blab. A surprise meme mixer produces a masterpiece.

Transcript of recent presidential remarks in a Chinese restaurant. 

THE PRESIDENT: I need some scary fun fun.

Q: Mr. President, how are you? 

THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some scary fun fun. 

Q: What would you like? 

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like. 

We are extremely impressed with this! And, it's scary fun fun.

Plurp. You remember, of course, all those breathless stories about spies in Guantanamo that were plastered all over the headlines last summer. You know - translators who were about to be charged with mutiny, sedition, espionage, spying and aiding the enemy -- crimes that could lead to their execution.

But maybe you missed this.

Guantanamo Spy Cases Evaporate

[...] [A]uthorities never charged him with any of those offenses. Instead, Yee will face much less serious charges, such as mishandling classified materials and adultery. [...]

Some experts on military law and the men's lawyers say the prosecutions of Yee and Halabi have been riddled with inconsistencies and oddities that cast doubt on the government's original fears that a spy ring was operating in the high-security prison for alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. 

"I find it difficult to believe professional prosecutors are proceeding with these two cases in this manner," said Gary D. Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University. "The ineptitude at each step of the proceeding is amazing. . . . It seems there's been investigative overreaction in both cases." 

Kinda like those Iraqi WMD, eh?

Yow. The Department of Fatherland Security unveils a new, more reassuring advisory system.

We're currently in Bert.

Plurp. We definitely recommend The Boy From Oz, a musical biography of Peter Allen so energetic and involving that the audience rose in a standing ovation at the end of a musical number, then again some time later at the end of the show.

We do, however, admit to a certain amount of confusion as to how there got to be two completely different actors named Hugh Jackman.

Plurp.

The blue dog
really liked that new
security advisory system

Friday, January 23, 2004

Blab. A person in our group at work writes:

Geek Cruise!

Oh, right. Computer-related classes that you take while on a cruise ship going to exotic destinations? You can, for instance, take their Linux Lunacy class while cruising around:

• Italy
• Turkey
• Greece, or
• Croatia.

They even tell you how to talk your boss into this boondoggle.

So, to everyone in our group at work: no. (But, you know, nice try.)

Blab. Inspired by Experiment 2, a reader takes the week off from work to write a book, and then send it to us.

soap is a molecule that requires water to mediate the molecular binding forces. too little or two much water and no bubble will occur. in the low water or middle ground it is likely that most of the water is participating in the binding actions. ice forms when water molecules organize. which means that you would need a mixture that contains a tolerable excess of water so there are free water molecules that can freeze. but the freezing would have to be very rapid as the ice crystals would cause voids in the surface of the bubble leading to its collapse. thus if you took a water-rich mixture of soap and water, blew a bubble, and let it drift into a liquid nitrogen vapor cloud you'd likely find freezing and cracking. check on aisle 32 of the 801 building. methinks they have liquid nitrogen.

in fact, if you froze such bubbles sufficiently fast you would have two things. first, you'd have a novel way of creating thin films for study (the soap mixture could carry other molecules). second, you could freeze the bubbles in their sphere-form and use them as an insulation material. if the bubble mixture contained molecules that formed long chains at low temps you could create very large, low temp bucky-ball structures. if the long-chain molecules were stable at higher temps you could slowly raise the temp (destroying the bubble) and leave a 3-d space structure of the desired molecule. even better is that soap will form a minimum energy surface (Boys, "Soap Bubbles") which means that you can force the 3-d structures to multiple, non-sphere shapes.

yet more interesting is that you could take these "frozen 3-d structures" and use them in manufacturing. if the molecule you dissolve will form space structures you could build an array of frozen soap-like hemispheres, deposit the materials on the space structures and then dissolve the space structures leaving the molecules as domes. if you build a transistor on the top of the dome it is isolated from the substrate which reduces leakage into the substrate and also improve the cooling. and 3-d structures can be stacked. 

and you could use the minimum memory property of a soap bubble to create shortest-path hops between area of a chip. wiring takes up a large portion of the chip. if i can build a lattice over a chip, hang a soap bubble structure strung thru the lattice, freeze it, deposit wires on it, and then remove the bubble-surface then i have a way of stringing wires (from tiny telephone poles :-)) above the chip area. this increases the available chip area, makes packing the transistor layouts easier, and reduces the impedence of the wires leading to a faster circuit.

you could also use the technique to form parabolic surfaces. if you make an array of these parabolas you could put them behind light-emitting transistors. so imagine a parabola with 3 leds "hanging" near the focal point. modulating the light from the 3 transistors would give you a "single" led that can go from white to black.

there is also a technique for creating "single molecule layer" films (Langmuir-Blodgett films). the trick is to create a single layer of a molecule on a wet surface and then "lift" a piece of material thru the layer. as you slowly lift it a single layer of the molecule will walk up the meniscus and deposit on the lifted material forming a single layer surface. (i was using this technique to create rewriteable paper.) if you form 3-d frozen Boys mimimum energy surfaces you could deposit the film on a film. if you deposit a molecule that changes shape when a voltage is applied you could create a super-thin 3-d "speaker" that you couldn't see but you could hear. (remember the floating "bit" from the film Tron? answer yes or no.) in fact, the soap bubbles themselves are probably slightly reactive to an electrical field and you could make a "speaker" that uses resonating bubbles to create the sound.

electricity travels on the surface of a conductor. if you create "foam wires" you have a much lighter substance that could still carry electricity. 

you could get rid of that pesky snow rather more efficiently if you used bubbles to spread a salt or calcium chloride mixture (rather than chunks of salt which have very low surface to volume ratios). you said that the bubble collapsed and turned into a rubbery substance. large surface area and low volume.

(umm, like i gotta get back to work. can't be wasting time on such useless activities as freezing soap bubbles.)

Dorian, the boy in the intellectual bubble.

We have got to get you together with our Midwest Correspondent, in whose environs these would be normal manufacturing methods.

Blab. Another reader continues the conversation whose subject is still unknown.

The Loli Exclusion Principle!

I Have noc le either except to suggest that you ask the GNE player Loli.

OK, Loli. Consider yourself asked. (We don't know what you're asked; nonetheless. This is a very confusing thread!)

Blab. A blind reader writes:

[link]

Transcript of recent presidential remarks.

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs. 

Q: Mr. President, how are you? 

THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs. 

Q: What would you like? 

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like. 

No, we're not kidding. It's on the White House site.

Blab. One of our many groupies writes:

Subj: as reported on TV tonight 

OOooooo......."Sting is 52 and still attracting women around the world."

Excuse me?  The sexiest guy around isn't 52 yet all the hot babes are after him!

STEVE!!!!!!  WooHoo!!!

Hot babes are kindly requested to form a double line behind the velvet ropes and await further instruction.

Blab. Another groupie breaks loose from the crowd and yells out.

i want to get YOUR juices flowing 

Yes, right. Please wait behind the velvet ropes.

Blab. A reader puts the Plurp shell up to its ear and listens intently.

I hear it's a traditional Japanese dance. But that's all I hear.

If you listen carefully, you can also hear the faint sounds of the literate, screaming.

Blab. A reader who has consistently asked us to correct the spelling in her Plurp contributions writes:

Subj: as seen seen again 

Ok, Steve, go back and look at my email from yesterday again.  It was so funnier than you reported.  Check MY spelling.  Hell, YOU live here!

Time to take a day off and stay at home (do I hear cheering from the far north??) so you can actually read your email properly.  And the marquis on the theater.

OK. Here's what our Treasured Reader sent us yesterday.

THE COOLER
    MYSTIC RIER

We leave it to you, our other Treasured Readers, to decide which brings more laughs per second - this version or our spelling-corrected version from yesterday.

And, BTW, we're giving up on that spelling correction thing. It's become too complicated.

Blab. A reader sends us some scary fun.

Scary fun spam I just received:

"SCARY FUN SCARY FUN FUN"

Hey - that is scary fun!

Blab. A reader contributes to our ever-expanding trove of knowledge.

Heh, heard new helenism;

"Cramp my pitch"
-"Queer the pitch"
-"Cramp my style"

-AJL

Excellent! We thank our oddly-named reader for its sharp ears and generous nature.

Just realised that the converse Helenism would be very funny (though isn't there some rule about non spontaneous ones - if it helps I'll insert it into conversation later)

"Queer my style"
-Queer the pitch
-Cramp my style. 

I guess candidates "Queer eye for the Straight Guy" would qualify to say that.

-AJL

Yes, but they might mean the opposite of its other meaning!

Blab. A reader sends us a ...

[link]

... which, despite its blind appearance, appears instead to be a rare-these-days Mia sighting!

We wish her well.

Blab. Plurp's own ASCII artist sends greetings.

*       *
|       |
|\_._._/|
|  o o  |   Der gruene Hund von Mars just
 \ ´.` /    peed on a rover. "Sorry NASA,
 |`---´| but that was MY rock."
 |     |
 |`___´|\_
/|     |\
##     ##

At a meeting yesterday, a friend said that he had just seen the Rover on Mars eBay.

Blab. A reader who has not yet been to Mars eBay writes:

It appears that Spirit, the mars rover, is not communicating because it is trying to solve some sort of problem locally. It may be rebooting. Experts are divided on the cause but there are only two hypotheses:
(a) perhaps windows was not the best choice of software or
(b) the autonomic computing routine has decided that there has been no need of radio for the whole trip from earth so the last few days are an anomoly and it has been corrected.

Dorian, the dispirited

Ian has our favorite theory.

Blab. A reader announces:

The word of the day is: megaphone.

Actually, it's culture

Plurp. Do people really open email with subject lines like this?

Subject: dont be someone that irritated other the most pains connected digraph

(Other than us, we mean.) We just wouldn't think it'd be a good strategy for spammers.

Yo. We're looking for funny remixes of Howard Dean's magical performance in Iowa this week. There are some links on the MTV site, but they're mostly audio-only, and how boring is that? (Though note that long-admired Lileks apparently has his own entry.) There are also some links here.

Readers are required to send us pointers to good video remixes of the Great Yowping Yaaargh!

And you need to do it before Dean drops out of the race in complete embarrassment. So hurry, OK?

Plurp. In a customer meeting yesterday, a colleague got up and gave a talk that featured the IBM crypto co-processor. The amusing thing: we were the only one in the room who knew that we had invented the technology some fifteen years ago.

It was kinda fun.

Yow. In a meeting today, somebody's cell phone went off. BFD, right? But the cool thing was that his ring tone was, well, a ring tone, as in the old fashioned bell-with-clapper Bell System black bakelite 1950s telephone.

Very amusing.

Yow. S&P now projects IBM's stock a year from now at $121. (It's currently $98.) We know you don't care, but we do. If this were to happen, some of our stock options would actually be above water!

Plurp. From a management memo at work today.

Workplace security reviews were conducted this year with an improvement in the violation rate.

We're doing our part!

Plurp.

The blue dog
turned out to be composed
entirely of trillions of
tiny
Langmuir-Blodgett
Buckyballs

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Blab. A clueless reader writes:

I have no clue ...

Whoa! Us neither! Readers with adventurous personalities (and no knowledge of Japanese) are invited to guess anyway!

Blab. Having been defeated at Takarati, one of our relatives appears as an avenging angel.

Computer versions of that damn stick game.

Got seventeen minutes to kill?

That's our family - undercutting the foundations of religion since time immemorial.

Blab. On the innate cleverness of the U.S. government, which is planning to use a computerized voting machines that was deemed insanely dangerous by the experts whose opinions they asked, a reader writes:

Not only do the facts not matter but you'll also notice that they plan to use the known-flawed system for the next federal election. The same is true of touch screen voting machines. They run M$ Access databases on top of Windows and can be reached and modified using a modem. There is no paper trail. I can safely predict that Bush will win the next election by 102% of the national population count (not just the number of actual voters). After all Saddam won by a 100% vote. Bush must do better. After which presidential term limits will be repealed. All hail King Bush.

Dorian, the independent

Vote early and often: Use Perl.

Blab. Another reader is sucked into the Great War Between Google and Vivisimo.

On the other hand, upon googling on 'thomas woodward "real name"', the first five hits (at least) all tell us that it was Tom Jones.

Indeed it does. Google is impressive.

Blab. A reader helps enlighten us on yesterday's confusing reader contribution.

The Loli Exclusion Principle, duh!

We still have no idea.

Blab. The mind control lasers are tuned to perfection, as evidenced by their effect on an NBC News reporter following our publication of Experiment 2 and its associated Second Physics Quiz.

News Flash at 7:54am! 

An NBC News reporter in St Paul, MN just performed the cracking soap bubble experiment on live TV.  Foolishly no one stayed around to see if it worked at -8 degrees.  Stupid news reporter.  I thought perhaps he was a Plurp reader.  Maybe he will show his work here today.

Maybe he will.

Blab. An NBC News reporter writes:

Clearly true.  The proof:

"A very-high-temperature regime, in which the substance cannot support a bubble at all."  This corresponds to the planet Mercury and the essence saffron.  In this regime, hope cannot be sustained, and events follow each other with no pattern.  But life is as common as death.  This is the Summer King, the sense of "information" in which random noise is high in information.

"A high-temperature regime in which it can support a bubble, and in which penetrating the substance causes it to pop catastrophically."  This corresponds to the planet Venus, and the Goddess Aphrodite.  Life prospers, and popular movements only serve to confirm the authority of the King.  When change comes, it comes suddenly.  The order of words is important, but fluid.

"An intermediate-temperature regime in which the substance is rubbery, and in which penetrating it causes neither catastrophic popping nor cracking."  Here is stubbornness and unreason, the influence of the planet Neptune.  "Rubbery" encodes "massive", encodes "unyeilding".

"A low-temperature regime in which the substance is brittle, and penetrating it causes cracks, which propagate within the material."  Denying change makes change inevitable.  Death comes as the end.  This is the Winter King, the regime in which the blank slate contains no information.   The ruling essence is thyme, the ruling orb the Moon.

We are impressed with reporters in the Frozen North as this is exactly right. And here we didn't figure that anyone would even step up to the challenge, much less get the right answer.

Blab. The shady minions of unnamed government agencies that monitor our every move taunt us with what we see every day on the marquee of the theater in our neighborhood.

THE COOLER
MYSTIC RIVER

This is, in our humble opinion, just a touch less funny than the version that preceded it:

BAD SANTA
THE COOLER

We're going to have to find out if whoever obtains movies for the theater really does have a subtle sense of humor.

Plurp. Meetings at work are so much fun!

Pick up the flag and run with it

• Pick up the ball and run with it
• Capture the flag

And ...

I want to get your juices thinking

• I want to get your juices flowing
• I want to get you thinking

On the other hand, ...

The market is massively narrow at the bottom.

And ...

As a business, we are very interested in mold.

No word on fungus. Not yet.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was the Summer King,
the sense of "information" in which
random noise is
high in information.

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Blab. A member of the tenure committee writes:

Shame on you. Posting your physics homework on the net for solution.

Professor Dorian

Hey. You have your standards. We have ours.

Blab. A reader asks the fundamental metaphysical question.

Why doesn't food and good rhyme? 

Actually, they do. We blame the public school system.

Blab. A reader helps us out on our our second physics challenge, telling us how large a trebuchet must be to fling Dubya to Mars.

When your smart readers figure out how to make the correct sized trebuchet, let us know, so we can set up a fund to build it.

Thank you for your support. We will take you up on that.

Blab. Who would win in a battle between Google and Vivisimo? This reader keeps score.

Last week I was trying to find out which celebrity had started life as Thomas Woodward. Far too many hits on Google, but one of the subheadings on Vivisimo gave me the answer: my, my my! Chalk one up for the big V.

How confusing. Who is "my, my my"?

Blab. Of yesterday's addition to the theme song from the Shower Stall of Progress, the jackbooted thugs who monitor our every action write:

Yes, it is true.  Steve was caught singing that really stupid song in the shower.  I thought he had lost his mind.  Happily, no music came from that same room this AM.  Whew!  That was close.  We can now crawl out of the covers.

Of course! Did you think we just made this stuff up? This is our life!

Blab. Morality seeps slowly through the blood-brain barrier.

"No, son, it's what your father does for a living."

It's about time.

"As scientists of conscience, we must consider the ethical ramifications of AI development," said Dr. Gregory Jameson, director of machine epistemology and ontology at MIT. "The Matrix taught us that we cannot ignore our obligation to the future of mankind. We must free our minds to this fact, or we will accidentally unleash a nightmarish army of sentient machines."

Klaatu barada Keanu.

Blab. A reader proposes:

Experiment #2 

Last week, right after I performed the drip experiment, I felt that I was on a real roll.  Steve had already left for work so I needed some sort of entertainment............

Our MW Corespondent once told Steve and me about how soap bubbles actually crack while floating in the air when the air temperature gets low enough.  Seems to me she said it had to be markedly below zero.  Expecting that'd never happen here any time prior to the next ice age, I figured I could produce results of some satisfying type.  I first tried to remember where I had put my little bottle of bubbles.  Not recalling that, I went into the kitchen and poured a small bowl of Joy liquid.  I had no little wand, so I opened up a pair of scissors and used the thumb hole. 

Ok, using full strength Joy got me lots of bubbles that, when they finally exploded, only produced a mist of tiny drops - no cracks that I could see.  I went back to the drawing board in the kitchen and added a couple of tablespoons of the Joy to a cup of water.  Maybe I needed to thin the solution out so the water might freeze, thus producing a crack.  Back to the terrace (actually I am no fool - I stood INSIDE!)  This time the bubbles didn't last as long and, when they did pop (ok, this is the exciting stuff!), all that remained was what appeared to be a rubbery, thin coating that fell to the snow/ground/ledge and froze instantly on the surface.  I don't know that that substance will ever disappear until the final thaw.  I pointed it out to Steve when he got home from work.

So, no cracks.  But some really weird plastic-y frozen rubber.

This leads to the Second Physics Quiz. Prove or disprove: Any substance elastic enough to form nearly spherical bubbles has four regimes, which depend strictly on temperature:

1. A very-high-temperature regime, in which the substance cannot support a bubble at all.
2. A high-temperature regime in which it can support a bubble, and in which penetrating the substance causes it to pop catastrophically.
3. An intermediate-temperature regime in which the substance is rubbery, and in which penetrating it causes neither catastrophic popping nor cracking.
4. A low-temperature regime in which the substance is brittle, and penetrating it causes cracks, which propagate within the material.

For motivation, note that soap solutions work this way, as does glass.

As always, show your work.

Blab. A reader takes things personally.

One note wonder?? Why I have posted as many as 5 notes in one visit. I guess that reviewer just has limited imagination. They prolly just don't understand the references.

Maybe they just can't count?

Blab. In this same vein, a reader who might be Loli writes:

That was a very poor impression of me someone posted on Monday. They can try, but there can only be one Loli. It is a law of physics or something.

We have no idea.

Plurp. This last week?

1. helen naked pitures
2. john walker lindh
3. images
4. thermobaric
5. baseball
6. dream
7. imani
8. iris chacon
9. irischacon nude
10. john walker

Right: Helen on top.

Wrong: Anything about Lindh or Chacon. OK?

Yow. We had the best time at work today, spending a couple of hours with friend Jim coming up with what just might be the most unbearably clever theoretical insight we've had in years. We think we have a cool way of understanding when decentralized vs. centralized control is best in certain classes of distributed systems.

'Course, we can't actually tell you this clever insight. First, we have to, like, see if it really works and submit patents and write papers and stuff.

But we feel certain that you will participate in our cryptic, if uncertain, glee.

Plop. Two questions. (1) Is online voting ready for the real world?

Because the danger of successful large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear.

So, uh, no.

But (2) do the facts matter?

The Federal Voting Assistance Program, part of the Defense Department, is moving ahead with the system.

So, uh, no.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was asked to read for the part of the
soap bubble
in Matrix 4: Byzantine Agreement

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Blab. Results are back from the physics quiz last Saturday in which we asked you to explain why a dribble of water on a very cold window freezes from the bottom up.

In general, we were pleased with the penmanship.

Heat rises. The tops of the streams are absorbing heat from the bottoms of the streams, allowing them to avoid freezing longer.

An interesting idea. But the dribble freezes within a second or two. Heat travels much more slowly than that in water, so there seems to be something missing still.

Blab. How about this?

"Now observe that the ends of the streams freeze first, and that the wave of freezing goes up the streams"

-- those are the parts longest exposed to the cold.

Possibly, but the process of spraying the water on the window is pretty fast, and we're not sure that the very first droplets are the ones that end up at the bottom of the drip.

Blab. A reader has a hunch.

Steve, 
I have a basic "sense" of physics, but don't have actual textbook training to explain physics in a scientific manner, ergo, I will do my best to explain the freezing stream of water. It seems to me that not only has the water at the bottom of the stream been exposed to the elemments longer (granted a very small measure of time here), but the actual action of rolling down the glass creates friction, which generates heat (also on a minute level), which causes evaporation. And, of course, evaporation has a cooling effect. Just a hunch.

Again, good intuition, but we suspect that the amount of heat generated by the stream as it slithers down the glass is PFS. (Pretty Freaking Small - it's a technical term.) And we suspect that any generated heat would tend to delay the freezing rather than hasten it.

Blab. An eager student writes:

Re: Observe that the ends of the streams freeze first, and that the wave of freezing goes up the streams. Explain. 

Me! Me! Me!
Here's a theory: When the water hits the glass and coalesces into streams, it warms up the glass directly under it (very locally, because glass is a bad conductor). When it runs down, it cools steadily because warmth is transferred to the glass and the environment. Now my assumption is that the glass directly under the water (which has been warmed up by the water) is now warm enough to keep the water from freezing immediately. Since the water is getting progressively cooler running down, the glass further down gets warmed up less and therefore cannot keep the water from freezing as long as the glass further up, which would explain the observed process.

Recommeded further research:
- Perform the same experiment on a metal surface. Maybe the water will freeze from top to bottom because heat spreads faster in metal (I'm not sure about that one, though - the freezing, not the spreading). 
- Take a cross-section of the stream the moment it freezes (please don't ask me how to do this). My guess is it freezes from the outside towards the glass surface, because the glass keeps the water warm.

Very smart S.

We think this is right! The window sucks heat out of the water pretty quickly (as compared to other effects suggested above), and the water at the bottom of the stream has contacted (and lost heat to) all of the glass under the stream.

We haven't tried it on metal, but we'd expect the same result. Metal conducts heat better than glass, but it's still very slow compared to how long it takes the drip to, well, drip. We'd expect it to be a less prominent effect on plastic, as the heat capacity of plastic is a lot less than that of glass or metal, so the plastic wouldn't cool the water as quickly or as much.

We suspect that the water closest to the glass freezes first, since that's where most of the heat transfer out of the stream occurs. Not having a high-speed camera (or equivalent super powers), we haven't actually looked.

So that was fun, and thanks to all of our participants!

Next: How large a trebuchet is required to fling Dubya to Mars?

Blab. Moving now to the question of what clever thing on this list sucked up several years of our own pitiful life, a reader makes a good guess.

re: your clever innovative thing. I've narrowed it down to either "Token-Ring Networking" or "Scalable Parallel Systems."  How'd I do?

Good, but, we fear, not quite right. We've never been much of a hardware weenie. Too many atoms.

Blab. A chicken writes:

has to be the Crypto Cruftyness, all truly curious enquirers are drawn to the arcane arts of obfustication.

Roger 

Correct, despite the obscure reasoning! In fact, we started working on physically secure cryptographic coprocessors in the mid-80s (very soon after we came to work at IBM Research) as a solution to the software protection problem. This morphed into a general purpose crypto co-processor, and resulted in a string of patents and a FIPS standard. A colleague did the hard work to actually get this stuff out as a product.

And the funny thing is: we didn't know anything about the whole area when we got into it. (This keeps happening to us.)

Blab. A reader takes the nitrous mask away from its face momentarily to make a wager.

I'll bet it was the IBM 4758 Cryptographic Coprocessor.   Hee hee hee hee hee hee.

All too true.

Here's another funny story. When my colleague Steve Weingart was working on the FIPS 140-1 standard for the security of cryptographic devices, he had a problem. He needed a way, within the standard, to span a range of security, from "the box is hard to open" all the way up to "nearly magical technology for intrusion response".

We had been playing a D&D variant and, of course, writing rules for it. So we suggested using a table that showed security requirements increasing with increasing "level" (in standard Gygaxian fashion), and using qualitative (rather than quantitative) characterizations of each level.

If you search for "Table 2." here, you'll see that this is exactly what ended up in the standard. It's a well-kept secret that it had its origins in D&D.

Blab. A reader who, no doubt, works just down the hall from us says, with a certain air of authority ...

It is the: IBM 4758 Cryptographic Coprocessor. 

I seem to be turning into a slacker -- I haven't done any patents for nearly three weeks now!

Get to work! We submitted one more invention disclosure just yesterday, bringing the one-week total to three.

Blab. A reader with a certain arcane knowledge of produce writes:

Know ye Kerry won?

Care ye Kerry won? And what did he win, really? We'd rather have a toaster.

Iowa's only interesting quality is that it is first in this little circus. Other than this bit of PR puffery, Iowa's only reason for existence is to keep Minnesota from sliding down into Missouri.

Blab. A reader give us ... information.

Google is nice.  Ad infinitum references.  Problem is it is not smart enough to organize the hits in any useful way. Vivisimo is nice.  It organizes the hits into general headins, the kind of thing that used to be known in books (B O O K S) as indexes.  A nice general index.  So, you get to look up George Washington and get subheads re cherry trees, for instance.  (Not true. I made that up.  But you do get subheads.)  So, instead of reading 300 entries having to do with GW's piles, dentures, brfeeches, land acquisition policies, skill at card games, you can focus in on the things that interest.   Thus Google against Vivisimo. Imperfect but useful for most searches.  I think.

Oooh. Books. We've heard of those! Do you have a good URL?

Yep, Vivisimo looks pretty cool. We should force ourself to use it and see if we like it. (We did that with spinach but we still hate spinach. You never know.)

Blab. A helpful reader finds more good dreck for us.

The IMDB entry for H.P. Lovecraft lists 31 films.

Cool! IMDB is a little wonky. Many of the films on your list don't show up when we simply search on Lovecraft. Odd.

Blab. What's for lunch?

Cow Brain Sandwiches!

Deep friend cow brain sandwiches at that. Darwin in action, we say.

They would make an excellent Fear Factor ploy, though!

Plurp. Favorite Spam Subject Line O' The Day.

Subj: We can teach you to make a forfootweartune online... 

Plurp. Some recess deep within our subconscious regurgitated a further lyric of the Shower Stall of Progress song while we were in the shower this morning. We figured we'd note it here.

There's a big bright, squeeky clean tomorrow,
Shining at the end of every day.
There's a big bright, squeeky clean tomorrow,
Just a bath away!

The plumbing arrives, and that's a start.
We put in the tub, with mind and heart,
And when it becomes a reality,
It's a place to bathe, for you and me.

There's a big bright, squeeky clean tomorrow,
Shining at the end of every day.
There's a big bright, squeeky clean tomorrow,
Just a bath away!

Catchy, isn't it?

Plurp.

The blue dog
thought that deep fried cow brain sandwich stuff
was a terrible idea

Monday, January 19, 2004

Blab. A reader declares, both inclusively and ominously ...

We're famous!

Oh, dear. It's a metafilter thread in which two different contributors recommend our own, stupid blog as a visit-every-day-for-sure blog. Shoot - we don't even visit here every day!

One contributor pigeonholes Plurp as "a bit of a one-note wonder." Are we? We should probably pack it in, if so.

(Still, we are gleeful at being insulted with a brand new Helenism.)

This will, no doubt, lead to a temporary spike in the incoming geek population, followed by a bubble-bursting Cavern of Ignominy to which no one ever visits again.

It's sad, really.

Blab. A reader confuses us with great familiarity.

Dear Steve, Maybe I missed this from ages ago, but isn't that a toupee (for reference: top left corner of this page)?

If you're referring to the top left corner of your email, that was blank, so you might have forgotten your toupee. If you're referring to the top left corner of this here page, the answer is: No. If you're referring to one of the Democratic presidential candidates, the answer is: Probably.

Blab. A reader writes:

Greetings!

I came across your website while doing some research on neural networks and their use in anti-virus software solutions. Would it be possible to ask you some questions in regards to your work in this area of study? Rest assured they are simple and straight to the point.

Thank you for your time - I eagerly await your response!

Regards, 

Daniel Rodriguez

Greetings! We eagerly await our response too!

Blab. Proving that certain monopolies don't have a sense of humor is this reader from across the pond.

Rowe is keeping his sense of humour.

It seems that Mr. Gates has unleashed his snapping lawyers on yet another Normal Person.

Rowe, a 17-year-old high school senior and Web designer from Victoria, has angered the software giant by registering an Internet site with the address www.MikeRoweSoft.com. 

How dare Mike register a homonymical site! The nerve! Anyhow, Microsoft wrote a nastygram to Mike, saying he was infringing on their copyright (to MikeRoheSoft^TM?). Generous Microsoft offered a gigantic $10 for the site. Mike asked for $10k. Boom. Instant news.

Still. We think Mike should have sold it to a pr0n site.

Blab. A readers warns us. And you.

The cats and the ponies are conspiring. Now is the time to panic.

Flee. While you still can.

Blab. There's still time for readers to posit theories about our low-temperature physics experiment! In the meantime, we publish some related snide remarks.

Cold outside there, Steve? Here's some clever solutions to keep warm if you step out...

Onion rings contain enough oil to burn for hours.

Ride in comfort on a flaming horse.

Nuclear radiation keeps your scalp and ears toasty.

You people really worry us. Have we told you that?

Blab. What's next?

A search engine with a lickable interface?  What's next?  Scratch-n-sniff Plurp?

Quite possibly! Stay tuned.

Blab. On that really funny thing from last week, a reader writes:

Q: What's brown and sticks to your shoe?
A: Plurp! ... Isn't that a running joke?

Or a cross-training joke. Or a tennis joke. Or a sports trainer joke.

Blab. A reader ... well, you figure it out.

i talked to oliverbot earlier today and i asked him how he could understand if he was a computer, he said how do you know i am a computer, i said you told me you are a computer, he said what if i told you i was really a person, i said but then you would be contradicting your self, and he said exactly, then i asked him to define abstract, he said interseting who told you that, i said no one i want you to tell me the defintion of abstract, he said That is a rather sweeping generalization about people.   and now i am tired of typing because i talked to oliver bot for atleast 2 hours and now i am going to use the restroom and hope that the plurp does not splash back and hit, but what is plurp, could you tell me. but then if you tell how do i know if i can believe you or not, and what is blab, why are all the blabs in this website italicized, i know italicized is spelled incorrectly but spelled is spelled correctly, which is quite amazing considering that when i speak i do not say spelled but spelt, which is incorrect english. And it should be obvious to me that it is incorrect english because i do not speak english but i speak american because they are 2 different languages and not one in the same.  How is it that you can call thoughts big if they do not take up space, and what is a thought, is it an idea, if so what is an idea.   what are your feelings on the subject? do you have feelings on the subject, of course not because feelings are not material items so they cannot be placed on top of the subject which is also an idea, which means that even if feelings were material objects they could not be placed on top of the subject. what is this something that you desire to be told, if it is in my abilities, which it cannot be because abilities is not a physical object with the ability to hold space, i will tell you what this something is that you wish to know. finally i am done to go use the restroom

Good to know.

Blab. A reader becomes Enlightened.

Hmm, Rumsfeld doing the Hokey-Pokey? You ARE a subversive blogger!

Next: Camp X-Ray!

Yak.

I feel my grey hair growing.

Plurp. We watched Sleepless in Seattle on TV Saturday. It was sponsored by Ambien.

Plop. This is why we don't ski. Seriously.

Plurp. Last night's Wildly Incorrect Chinese Fortune Cookie told us this:

Your secret desire to completely change your life will manifest.

Which seems unlikely!

Yo.

We Are The Space Robots
Pak Chooie Unf
We Are Here To Protect You
From The Terrible Secret Of Space
Please Go Stand By The Stairs

We find (the linked thing) both fascinating and very funny. We don't understand why. Perhaps our Treasured Readers can explain.

Yow. Ooh! And another in our irregular series of Exploding Head Vids. We'll have to put the whole collection together some time.

Plurp. Just how many H.P. Lovecraft stories (broadly interpreted) have been made into movies (broadly interpreted)? It turns out that the answer is thirteen (though - gosh! - there might be lots more).

1. Beyond Re-Animator (2003)
2. An Imperfect Solution: A Tale of the Re-Animator (2003)
3. Dagon (2001)
4. Nyarlathotep (2001)
5. In the Mouth of Madness (2000)
6. Un siècle d'écrivains: Le cas Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1998) (TV)
7. Necronomicon (1994)
8. Lurking Fear (1994)
9. The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993)
10. Bride of Re-Animator (1990)
11. The Unnamable (1988)
12. From Beyond (1986)
13. Re-Animator (1985)

Each and every one of them a stinker, we suspect, though we haven't seen them all. Treasured Readers who have seen any of these that were not stinkers (the movies, not the readers; we care deeply about your personal hygiene, of course, but that wasn't what we were referring to) should be sure to tell us.

Plurp.

The blue dog
was a bit of a
one-note wonder

Sunday, January 18, 2004

Plurp.

© 2001-2004 Steve R. White, All Rights Reserved