Merrill

"Roll your own crypto" may not be entirely bad either.

Suppose that you encrypt your message using "my own crypto". The result is ciphertext that looks like a random bit sring. Then encrypt the ciphertext using a standard algorithm such as AES.

An attacker will have difficulty since a successful decryption of AES is hard to recognize as such.

The disassociation of how you make your living and where you live will have interesting long-term social consequences.

Until recently, most people have had to live where they made their living. Farmers lived on farms. Workers lived near mines, mills, factories and offices in which they worked. Even rich people lived in the cities where their businesses and investments were located, at least until the late 1800s when rail commuting to nearby suburbs allowed them to live in more pleasant surroundings. Even so, the wealthy continued to identify with their cities, participated in civic life, indulged in philanthropy, and were reasonably concerned about their city's quality of life.

In the 1960s, jet travel became cheap and frequent for the wealthy. The really rich became detached from the cities and moved to enclaves of wealth in Newport, Carmel, Palm Springs, Palm Beach, etc. from which they could reach cities occasionally, but from which they could safely ignore urban problems. The urban cores declined, in part, because the wealthy no longer cared.

Information technology enables a whole new slice of the population to detach where they live from where they make their living. Their political and social interests will shift to where they live, and they will abandon where they make their living.

I've heard that its your manager's manager that is important to your career. Your manager can't actually promote you, except by recommending you as their replacement if promoted or transferred. Your manager's manager can either promote you or work a deal with their peers to get you promoted.

If your manager is keeping your performance results from being reflected upwards, you have a problem.

Lucky they found a use for the toxic waste from oil refineries by mixing it with sand and gravel and rolling it down on roads.

On the other hand, as vehicles go electric, there won't be any new asphalt to make roads for them to run on.

Subsequent to '56, the prior transistor patents were royalty free, as were all Bell System patents prior to '56. Patents subsequent to '56 had to be licensed on a "reasonable" and "non-discriminatory" basis. So the patent output of Bell Labs was largely useful only for internal Bell System use, for leverage in cross-licensing agreement, and for a minimal royalty revenue compared with the value of the patents to other industries.

Long distance and local service are not really different markets from a customer point of view, at least no one thinks of them as such today. All calls have become flat-rate nationwide. They were different markets from a supplier point of view for a couple decades, since long distance required analog frequency division microwave transmission equipment that had to be engineered end-to-end and switching systems able to translate NPA and NNX into trunk group selections. The latter was expensive and distinguished "toll" from "local" switching systems. However, by the time of the breakup, digital fiber optics and large memory computer-controlled switches already were making those supplier distinctions rapidly obsolete.

The operating companies were charged a 1% fee on revenues as a patent royalty and this funded Bell Labs Research, Systems Engineering, and part of Advanced Development of devices and systems. A similar amount was provided by Western Electric for advanced development, development and research on manufacturing technology. At times the research and development funding by the DoD was larger than the civilian part.

I was told that one reason that Bell Labs was formed from parts of AT&T Engineering and Western Electric Engineering was to keep the researchers from meddling with the business and to keep the business from meddling with the research. The latter was important because a strategic objective was to use technological change as a driver to prevent the monopoly telecom business from going to seed. Within Bell Labs there were often competing groups working on alternative next generation systems - analog versus digital, tube versus transistor, space division versus time division switching, coax versus microwave, microwave versus fiber, etc.

The Bell System, IBM and Xerox, which all had corporate research labs were all monopolies in effect - the Bell System by regulation and the '56 Consent Decree, IBM by overwhelming market dominance, and Xerox by patent protections. This gave all three corporations excess monopoly profits, some of which could be devoted to research. Although the antitrust suit against IBM was settled, it did modify IBM's behavior and it ultimately failed to compete well with mini and microcomputer companies. In Xerox case, the expiration of patents allowed competitors into the market.

Without a monopoly a corporation will find it very difficult to justify research that can be used by other businesses.

The transistor was a disaster for the Bell System. It was not particularly useful in the telephony system of the day, which used high voltages in tube transmission equipment and high, intermittent currents in electromagnetic switching equipment. On the other hand, the 1956 Consent Decree forced the Bell System out of other businesses (audio, computer, consumer electronics, etc.) and out of other countries (Canada, Caribbean). So the Bell System could not use it's new transistor to expand in the businesses where it fit, and having a fundamental patent on it exposed the Bell System to great anti-trust scrutiny and greater regulatory duress, such as the FCC Computer Inquiries.

I would stop communicating. No more read/reply for emails or messages. No phone calls. No writing or reading of memos or other documents. No creating presentations, diagrams, or drawings.

On the other hand, it is really hard to stop thinking about work, and maybe not necessary or advantageous. Most of the really good ideas that I've had came to me while I was not working. Your subconscious can be working even while you are doing other things.

Thanks. That's a good thread.

I was there only part of a day. Had a day off in Phoenix, and a colleague and I drove to Flagstaff via Arcosanti and Sedona. Discussion on that thread gives a lot of information about what has happened since. The book I bought in their store had a lot of ideas about huge cities built as monolithic structures, unlike what is on the ground now.

A more modest, but no less idealistic, example is Arcosanti north of Phoenix. I visited it in the late '80s when it was just getting started. There was not a lot then, but at least work continues. Paolo Soleri's visions were much more ambitious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Soleri

Paris' straight, wide avenues and beautiful parks are the result of Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Eug%C3%A8ne_Haussmann

Perhaps Amazon would require third-party sellers to have liability insurance or post an adequate bond to cover claims for goods shipped to California.

Sellers then might need to increase prices for goods shipped to California. Alternatively, they could be "not eligible for shipment to California".

We Were Pirates, Too

>The ship carrying Francis Cabot Lowell and his family home from England in the summer of 1812 was intercepted by a British war squadron, which held the passengers and crew for some days at the British base at Halifax, Canada. Lowell’s baggage was subject to several intensive searches, for his captors had been warned that he may have stolen designs for power textile weaving machinery, a serious crime in England. Lowell, indeed, had done just that — but, aware of the risk, had committed the designs to memory.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

In many applications, such as filtering queries to a data store (Figure 1), the Bloom filter will start out empty and fill as items are added to the data store and inserted into the Bloom filter. The false positive rate will be very low and then increase non-linearly as the Bloom filter fills. The average false positive rate over the life of the filter is much lower than the design false positive rate for the full filter given by the math.

Not eating out is a definite plus.

Infrequent trips to the supermarket is also a plus, since that one bag of chips now has to last a week until the next trip. In general, the ratio of junk food to real food purchases has decreased.

Last week the power was out Tuesday 2 pm until Friday 8 pm, 78 hours. I left the lid shut on a 7 cubic foot chest freezer in the garage, where the ambient was in the 70s F most of the time due to the cool weather. When the power came back on, the temperature was about 37 degrees at the top of the freezer. Ice cream in the second layer down had a light bit of crystallization, but no other obvious defects. Other food will be evaluated before being eaten, but it should be safe since it was below or at normal refrigerator temperature, although texture may suffer due to being refrozen.

Table 1 gives the relation between mask names and numbers.

Having to use the table to relate the pictures to the results does seem very poor.

World War I resulted in huge change in governance of the world. By its end the monarchies of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires had been swept away. If you include the Chinese Revolution of 1911 that ended the Ming Dynasty, only the British and Japanese Empires still were ruled by monarchs and royal families.

World War I ended the legitimacy of the divine right to rule others by virtue of noble birth.

The discussion of risk is interesting. It is not uncommon for small farms with one or a few crops or animal species to have an annual net income which varies considerably from year to year depending on weather, disease, pests, market prices, and the cost of inputs such as fuel, fertilizer, etc. Small farmers have to tolerate variations in income greater than most salaried city dwellers.

The risks and consequent variations can be reduced by increasing scale, diversifying crops and animal husbandry, and by using financial tools, such as futures.

The history of economic development follows this trend even more so over the centuries. Business units become larger, technological processes more diverse and complex, and financial tools are created to smooth out variations in growth.

Thus, short term risks are reduced and mild adversities are avoided, but this comes at the cost of increasing long term risks and great catastrophes. Ultimately, global warming may put an end to this strategy.

Maybe FedEx, UPS, and DHL should start first?

Possibly they could go to single pilot operation on freighters?

Back in the day when online learning was channels on Community Antenna TeleVision systems reserved for Community Colleges, I was studying the digital bandwidth required for online learning via telecommunications.

Although I don't have a reference, I found a study by a German university that compared classes delivered by television with classes delivered with a combination of sound, pictures, graphics and text.

The result was that the latter was as effective as video for all categories of classes, even those teaching kinetic skills such as golf and tennis.

Moving pictures, especially those of the head and shoulders of a professor delivering a lecture, are completely unnecessary.

I think that the key to online learning is the care and expertise with which the content is developed, especially the narrative, pictures, graphics, and reference material, as well as the design and effective use of collaboration tools by the TAs and students.

There are some open pit mines that are likely to last quite a while. The largest is 4 km wide by 1.2 km deep and even if filled in by drifting sands, it would be unmistakably artificial. https://blog.iseekplant.com.au/blog/5-largest-open-pit-mines

Dams are also likely to be detected. The dams themselves may have disappeared, but the artificial sediment beds in the valleys upstream will likely persist for a very long time.

Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science - Part 1 https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UBCx+China300.1x+3...

Chinese Thought: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science - Part 2 https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UBCx+China300.2x+3...

Excellent course.

>For a long time, adult NHSTA and IIHS tests used a 1970s 50%-ile male dummy, which is 5'9" and 171lbs. ... >For reference, in 2019, the average weight of a U.S. adult male was 198 lbs and the average weight of a U.S. adult female was 171 lbs.

So the average mass of the American male has increased 15% in 50 years! No data on whether he is taller, but I'd bet the BMI has gone up.

International travel may never be the same, particularly if there is never an effective vaccine. It looks like the globe is breaking down in to areas where Covid-19 is effectively suppressed and other areas where it is not and herd immunity will be the eventual answer. Travel between the areas will require quarantine in at least one direction, limiting ad hoc travel and tourism.

International tourism and cruising may also lose their impact for social signalling. Both are at least partly motivated by the desire to come back and tell all your friends about where you were and what a wonderful time you had. The actual experience of having your pocket picked or being in a norovirus outbreak may not be all that great.

>The 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian: Буревестник; "Petrel", NATO reporting name: SSC-X-9 Skyfall) is a Russian experimental nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile under development for the Russian Armed Forces. The missile is claimed to have virtually unlimited range. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Central_Navy_Testing_Ran...

It appears that the Fujitsu A64FX is planned for Cray as well as its own A64FX machines, the PRIMEHPC FX1000 and PRIMEHPC FX700 models.

https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/11/12/cray-fujitsu-both-bringin...

>The new HPE-Cray system, part of the Cray CS500 lineup, will employ the Fujitsu A64FX Arm-based processor with Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) and second-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM). Named as customers in today’s release are Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Stony Brook University, and University of Bristol. Cray and Fujitsu said they will be exploring engineering collaboration, co-development, and joint go-to-market strategies to meet customer demand as supercomputing extends into the exascale era.

It looks like this is not an ARM core, but a Fujitsu implementation of the Arm v8-A instruction set and Fujitsu-developed Scaleable Vector Extension. Most likely the latter is doing all the heavy lifting.

https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/resources/news/press-re...

>A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers. Building on over 60 years' worth of Fujitsu-developed microarchitecture, this chip offers peak performance of over 2.7 TFLOPS, demonstrating superior HPC and AI performance.

"Conceptual entrepreneurs" might describe most conspiracy theorists.

The photons from the screen are real.

Everything else is conjecture. If I look back at photos I've taken, I can conjecture that they appear to be an accurate record of what I was seeing when I took them, and that no one has surreptitiously hacked my phone and altered them. If I look at a photo of a grandson posted by my daughter, I can reasonably conjecture that it is also a faithful facsimile of his appearance at that time and place. If I look at a video of a third person posted by my niece, there is zero assurance that it represents reality.

So the default position has to be that the colored dots are for entertainment only, and not to be taken seriously, unless there is some valid reason to believe otherwise.