January 2008 Archives

I remember reading this a couple of years ago, and being entertained both by the question itself and the heated debate about the right answer.

Here's the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: "A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?"

http://www.kottke.org/06/02/plane-conveyor-belt

This debate has been crackling along for so long that Mythbusters decided to tackle it on the air last night. Tested first with a model airplane, and then with an ultralight. I watched it this morning, and then hopped over to Kottke to read his recap (spoiler alert). Once again, the comments provide much entertainment.

A rare crowd-free moment in Epcot again.

Taken in France, as the day was nearing an end.

Yesterday it was forty or so, with a little bit of misty rain. We knew that it was going to get very cold, very fast.



But still. Current temp outside -- with a nasty wind chill -- is better than 70 degrees cooler than it was this time yesterday.



I'm all for winter being winter, and dealing with below zero temps, but enough already with the whiplash-inducing drops in the mercury.

Update: man-oh-man, the sun goes down, and the temperatures drop even more. Just making the quick dash across the parking lot outside of karate, or on the way into a restaurant for dinner, and the wind and the cold bites hard

Very good, link-rich essay from Bruce Schneier on the debate between security and privacy:

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don't have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it's based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach.

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and -- possibly -- sky marshals. Everything else -- all the security measures that affect privacy -- is just security theater and a waste of effort.

By the same token, many of the anti-privacy "security" measures we're seeing -- national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on -- do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats.

The debate isn't security versus privacy. It's liberty versus control.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/security_vs_pri.html

Something else I'll be slowly catching up on: travel photos from the past year.

One of the most innovative -- and emotionally evocative -- games I've played in recent memory is as old-school as they get. I can't recommend this game enough. It takes only a handful of minutes to play, and has a surprising amount of replay value. Download it here, and after you've had a chance to play it, read some of the author's comments on the inspiration behind the design and gameplay here.



Via Mark Hurst.

There were some template issues that I didn't feel like dealing with. Wasn't happy with from the get-go, which tempered my willingness to post. And then there were the holidays, and a deep dive back into work. The spam was terrible, too, clogging up not only my database here, but my e-mail account with all those notifications of "unapproved comments." Plenty of reasons to stay away.

Today, though, saw some long overdue house cleaning. I apologize to anyone if I inadvertently deleted your comments that might have been left during my last month or more of inactivity. I had to blow through about 500 spam comments, and I stopped taking the time to scan through every subject line, at least until I made my way back to the beginning.

I'm feeling pretty good, though. The cobwebs have been dusted. The templates, while not exactly perfectly perfect, will more than suffice until the urge to tinker surfaces again. Spam will be well handled by the same plug-in I'd used prior to my 4.x upgrade (http://alogblog.com/movabletype/plugins/ccode_and_tcode_for_mt_40/) -- which should see pretty much no comments going through that aren't generated by a human. So comment moderation, finally, has been turned off.

What else? The time away from these pages has been good (and I can honestly say I missed it only a little bit), but not now that I've taken the time to get the behind-the-scenes and set things right, I'm very much looking forward to returning.