Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Well, how do you like them apples?

Saturday, October 5th, 2019

I went over to GT Distributors this morning for Glocktoberfest. Oddly, while it isn’t terribly far from my office, I don’t make it over there that often: they tend to be more police and tactical oriented, and have less on the vintage S&W side. (Bill Orr, the founder, is a highly respected member of the S&W Collectors Association. It’s just that vintage Smiths aren’t their main line of business.)

But I had some Glock related stuff I was kind of looking for, and thought I’d swing by and check out Glocktoberfest.

Of course, they were doing door prize drawings. I went ahead and signed up, even though I never win door prizes. Then I browsed a little and waited for the door prize drawing at the top of the hour.

I’ve got my ticket out and am listening to them call the numbers. As I said, I never win door prizes, but hope springs eternal, right?

Then they called my number.

Well, okay, then. I don’t want to make a big deal about it: this was one of the hourly door prizes, not the big final prize (a new Glock). But the hourly prize was one of those snazzy 5.11 Tactical RUSH 24 backpacks. It’s kind of like walking into some place, hanging out for a bit, and then someone hands you a $100 bill right out of the blue.

(And I did pick up a few relatively small items: they were selling used Glock 22 and S&W M&P .357 SIG/.40 standard capacity magazines for $10 each. At that price, I figured I’d pick up a couple of each as a hedge. I also picked up some of the tchotchkes they were giving away for free, a Glock 42 magazine +1 mag extension for experimental purposes, and some FMJ .380 auto.)

They did take my photo for promotional purposes (with my enthusiastic consent) but I don’t see it on Facebook yet. I hope I didn’t break the guy’s phone…

Posted in Endorsements, Geek, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 3, 2019.

Thursday, October 3rd, 2019

Bill Bidwill, owner of the Arizona (formerly St. Louis) Cardinals.

Under Bidwill’s ownership, the Cardinals toiled in mediocrity. They had five winning seasons from 1972 until Ken Whisenhunt was hired as head coach in 2007, Michael’s first year in charge. The Cardinals went to their first and only Super Bowl the next season.

I’m wondering if we’re going to see an NFL team for sale soon, and if that’s going to result in a possible relocation. LA and Las Vegas are off the map…but with the St. Louis Rams gone, and a past history for the Cardinals there…?

John Rothman. Kind of an obscure figure, but interesting: he pioneered electronic access to the NYT archives.

Working on the index led Mr. Rothman to think about how computers could store, sort and deliver abstracts of Times content to users at the paper and other locations, like public libraries, universities and major corporations. He proposed the Information Bank — the Times Index writ large — in 1965 and began working on it with IBM the next year.

…

In 1972, Times staff members began testing the Information Bank as a research tool. It would soon augment the paper’s archives, known as the morgue, where file cabinets are packed with clippings dating to the 19th century. In Times Talk, the paper’s in-house newsletter, Mr. Rothman assured colleagues that “once the basic methods” of searching the Information Bank were mastered, “retrieving the information is quite simple.”
In late 1972, the first installation of the Information Bank outside The New York Times was made at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library. Within six months, its 14 customers included NBC, The Associated Press, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Library of Congress, Exxon and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

I’ve been running behind, so for this historical record: Jessye Norman.

Posted in Geek, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

Thanos, call your office, please.

Friday, August 30th, 2019

Actual HouChron headline (on their homepage):

Drug ring had enough fentanyl to kill half of Texas

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: August 28, 2019.

Wednesday, August 28th, 2019

Tweet of the day:

Michael Drejka was convicted of manslaughter. (Previously.) You can call me lazy, but I’m going to point to Andrew Branca again, who is an actual lawyer and knows something about use of force and the law:

This case is an excellent example of how tiny changes in the fact pattern could lead to drastically different legal outcomes. If McGlockton had made any apparent movement consistent with re-engaging Drejka, Drejka’s perception of an imminent attack would likely have been unquestionably reasonable. Even a mere shift of McGlockton’s body weight toward, rather than away from, Drejka might have been sufficient. Such evidence was not in the case, however.
Also extremely unhelpful to Drejka was his post-event interrogation by police, to which he voluntarily consented, without legal counsel present. In that interrogation a happily compliant Drejka, believing he’s just helping the police understand why his shooting of McGlockton was no problem, hardly an inconvenience, as the internet meme puts it, agrees to conduct a re-enactment of the shooting.

“Really, seriously, just shut the f–k up.”

Interesting post from Stephen Wolfram’s blog that sits at a couple of intersections: rare book geekery, computer science (the rare book belonged to Turing), and detective work.

Actual headline from the Austin American-Statesman:

Industry experts give high marks to Statesman site plan

The article goes on to state that, according to industry experts, all of the Statesman reporters are intelligent, attractive, and all of their bodily functions smell like apple cinnamon Glade plug-ins.

Perhaps slightly more interesting: this column about the Texas State Cemetery, tied to Cedric Benson’s burial there. While the writing is slightly grating, it does answer some questions I had about who gets in and how.

Posted in Books, Geek, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Please refrain from tasting the KNOB.

Friday, August 16th, 2019

As a Bluetooth guy, and as someone who just posted a bunch of DEFCON 27 stuff, I feel compelled to say something about the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth Attack (aka KNOB) which has been getting a lot of attention the past few days.

Here’s the actual paper from the USENIX Security Symposium.

The attack allows a third party, without knowledge of any secret material (such as link and encryption keys), to make two (or more) victims agree on an encryption key with only 1 byte (8 bits) of entropy. Such low entropy enables the attacker to easily brute force the negotiated encryption keys, decrypt the eavesdropped ciphertext, and inject valid encrypted messages (in real-time). The attack is stealthy because the encryption key negotiation is transparent to the Bluetooth users. The attack is standard-compliant because all Bluetooth BR/EDR versions require to support encryption keys with entropy between 1 and 16 bytes and do not secure the key negotiation protocol. As a result, the attacker completely breaks Bluetooth BR/EDR security without being detected. [Emphasis in the original – DB]

Here’s a higher level overview of how the attack works.

Also of interest, also from USENIX, also getting some media attention: “Please Pay Inside: Evaluating Bluetooth-based Detection of Gas Pump Skimmers“. What’s cool about this is that the authors have developed Bluetana, an Android app that scans for Bluetooth devices in the area (every five seconds), displays a list of devices it found, and highlights ones that show characteristics similar to those of Bluetooth skimmers.

First, the app checks the device’s class. All skimmers studied within this work, whether discovered by Bluetana or not, had a device class of Uncategorized. If the device class is not uncategorized, the data is saved for later analysis. The device’s MAC prefix is then compared against a “hitlist” of prefixes used in skimming devices recovered by law enforcement. If the device has a MAC that is not on this hitlist, it is unlikely to be a skimmer, and the app highlights the record yellow. Next, if the device name matches a common product using the same MAC prefix, the record highlights in orange. If all three fields (MAC prefix, Class-of-Device, and Device Name) indicate the device is likely to be a skimmer, Bluetana highlights the record in red. The highlighting procedure is the result of a year of refinements based on our experience finding skimmers in the field, and Bluetana includes a remote update procedure to account for these incremental changes.

I’m fascinated by both of these papers, just based on a preliminary skimming. I’m hoping to do a detailed reading at that mythical point in the future when I have more free time…

Posted in Android, Bluetooth, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Oh the weather outside is frightful…

Wednesday, July 31st, 2019

…actually, it’s not all that bad in Austin. The estimated high today is a mere 99 degrees Fahrenheit (558.67 degrees Rankine).

But I know many of my readers are suffering from the heat, so here’s something that I hope will cool you down for a few minutes:

“The Stranding of the MV Shokalskiy”.

Beyond my interest in polar exploration, there’s a lot of stuff in here that prompted chuckles:

Mawson kept going, covering the last 100 miles by himself. Whether or not he snacked on Mertz is a polarizing question in Mawson scholarship.

…

Reached by the BBC, the poor marketing person for the adventure company put it succinctly: “The hull has a hole the size of a fist and the outlook is not so positive for the ship at the moment.”
The outlook became less positive a few minutes later, when the ship sank.

…

Ernest Shackleton is one of those genuinely admirable people, like Nikola Tesla or Frida Kahlo, who are somehow diminished by the embrace of their posthumous admirers. I think of this as Rick and Morty syndrome. You love the original, but then you look around in horror at the people enjoying it with you and think—is this me? These people are awful! Will I become one of them?

…

In 2013, Turney saw a chance to answer a question no one was asking—what if Shackleton had had a Twitter feed?

…

There had already been choral music, and there threatened to be more.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Non historical note, not suitable for use in schools.

Saturday, July 20th, 2019

I bow to nobody as far as my interest in the space program goes.

But I don’t have a darn thing to say about Apollo 11, or the 50th anniversary of same. This just feels like one of those big round number anniversaries where everybody is on top of it, everything that can be said has already been said, and there’s nothing left.

If you want something, go over to Lawrence’s.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Disappointment.

Wednesday, July 17th, 2019

I saw a post about the Kickstarter for Papillon and said to myself, “Man! What a cool idea!”

I’m not really into MMORPGs, but the idea of one where you could play a prisoner in a penal colony in French Guyana, dodging guards, forming alliances with other prisoners, struggling to survive solitary confinement, and plotting escape? I could get behind that.

Then I clicked through to the link. Apparently it has something to do with butterflies.

I like my idea better.

Posted in Geek | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 22, 2019.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Stanton T. Friedman, UFOlogist.

Thomas Silverstein is dead.

Mr. Silverstein was serving three consecutive life terms for the killing of two fellow prisoners and a guard while behind bars. He had been incarcerated continuously since 1975, originally on an armed robbery conviction. He was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.
He was in solitary confinement for 36 years, more than half his life. The American Civil Liberties Union has cited his case in its campaign against long-term solitary confinement.

More:

In 1981, Mr. Silverstein and another inmate, Clayton Fountain, were convicted of murdering Robert Chappelle, a member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang. During the trial, the gang’s national leader, Raymond (Cadillac) Smith, was transferred to Marion, apparently intent on killing Mr. Silverstein in revenge. (Prison officials, Mr. Silverstein said later, were aware of the threats but “didn’t take any action to make me safe.”)
Mr. Silverstein and Mr. Fountain got to Mr. Smith first, stabbing him 67 times with makeshift weapons, then dragging his body along prison catwalks as an object lesson. Mr. Silverstein received two more life sentences, for the murders of Mr. Chappelle and Mr. Smith. He insisted that he was innocent of the Chappelle murder and that he had killed Mr. Smith in self-defense.
By 1983 Mr. Silverstein had taken up art, teaching himself and becoming accomplished at it. One day, on his way back from showering, another prisoner handed him another makeshift knife and a homemade key. Using it, he managed to unlock his handcuffs and then fatally stabbed Merle E. Clutts, an unarmed correction officer, about 40 times.

His running buddy Mr. Fountain killed another guard that same day. These incidents are (at least in part) what prompted the construction of the SuperMax prison in Colorado.

Mildly interesting fact that I ran across last night: Clayton Fountain, who was also confined in solitary, took theology courses, converted to Catholicism, and was accepted as a lay brother by a Trappist order after his death.

Posted in Geek, Law, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 14, 2019.

Tuesday, May 14th, 2019

Robert Maxwell, the kind of badass that’s rare these days.

September 7, 1944:

Technician Fifth Grade Maxwell and a few other G.I.s were on observation duty outside their battalion headquarters near the city of Besançon in eastern France when German soldiers got within yards of their outpost and opened fire.
The Germans blasted away with automatic weapons and even antiaircraft guns, seeking to destroy the stone house where the battalion commanders were stationed. The G.I.s on sentry duty were armed only with .45-caliber automatic pistols, but they fired back.
And then a grenade was hurled over the fence in front of the house’s courtyard and landed beside Technician Maxwell. Using an Army blanket for protection, he fell on the grenade.

…

The grenade exploded, knocking him unconscious, tearing away part of one foot and peppering his head and left arm with shrapnel. World War II was over for Technician Maxwell, but he received the Medal of Honor. It cited him for inspiring his fellow G.I.s to join with him in a firefight that delayed the German onslaught and then, having “unhesitatingly hurled himself squarely upon’’ the grenade, “using his blanket and his unprotected body to absorb the full force of the explosion.”
The citation called it an “act of instantaneous heroism” that “permanently maimed” him but “saved the lives of his comrades.”

Mr. Maxwell was 98 when he passed away Saturday. According to the NYT obit, there are three Medal of Honor recipients from WWII that are still alive.

Fleming Begaye Sr., one of the Navajo code talkers.

Mr. Begaye survived the Battle of Tarawa, a costly offensive on a Japanese-held Pacific atoll that took place in 1943. Out of 18,000 Marines who landed on Betio, more than 1,000 died.
“His landing craft was blown up and he literally had to swim to the beach to survive,” Mr. [Peter] MacDonald [also a code talker – DB] said of Mr. Begaye at the White House ceremony.
Mr. Begaye landed on Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands, in 1944 and was “shot up real badly,” Mr. MacDonald said. He spent a year in a naval hospital.

…

“He was proud to serve his country,” Ms. [Theodosia] Ott [his granddaughter – DB] said. “He said, ‘It was already our country anyway; we were just helping to make sure it stayed our country.’”

César González Barrón, aka “Silver King“, died last Saturday. Silver King was a lucha libre wrestler, who also played “Ramses” in “Nacho Libre”. He died during a match in London against “Youth Warrior” (Juventud Guerrera).

Mr. González Barrón was a star in Mexican wrestling, known as lucha libre, in which combatants wear elaborate masks and take on outlandish personas.
At the event in London, called the Greatest Show of Lucha Libre, Mr. González Barrón had reprised his role as the evil Ramses.
He was the son of a famous wrestler known as Dr. Wagner, and he had been wrestling professionally since 1985, according to his profile on the film website IMDB. During his career, he was a CMLL World Heavyweight champion, an AAA World Tag Team champion and had won many other championships.

Goro Shimura, mathematician, passed away about a week ago.

In 1955, Yutaka Taniyama, a colleague and friend of Dr. Shimura’s, posed some questions about mathematical objects called elliptic curves. Dr. Shimura helped refine Dr. Taniyama’s speculations into an assertion now known as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

Elliptic curves are pretty important to modern cryptography, and Mr. Shimura’s work is foundational in that area. But there’s more to the story:

In 1986, Kenneth Ribet of the University of California, Berkeley, proved an intriguing connection: If Fermat’s Last Theorem were wrong, and there indeed existed a set of integers that fit the equation, that would generate an elliptic curve that violated the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

So basically, this reduced the problem of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem to proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

In the 1990s, Andrew Wiles, then also at Princeton, figured out how to do just that, and Fermat’s Last Theorem had finally been proved true.

The story I’ve heard (I wasn’t there) is that Wiles spent the better part of two days going through his proof of the conjecture, finally finished it…and then added, “Oh, by the way, by Ribert’s result, this means that Fermat’s Last Theorem is also true. Q.E.D.”

Posted in Geek, Heroism, History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 17, 2019.

Wednesday, April 17th, 2019

Owen Garriott, astronaut.

In 1973 he was the science pilot of Skylab 3, the record-breaking 59-day mission — more than double the duration of any previous flight — to Skylab, the first United States space station.
He logged nearly 14 hours outside Skylab in three spacewalks, during which physiological and biomedical metrics were monitored to determine the body’s response to long periods spent in reduced gravity.

…

He returned to space in 1983 on the 10-day flight of the shuttle Columbia, which carried the European Space Agency’s Spacelab 1 module, on which a multinational team of scientists conducted research.
On that mission, Dr. Garriott operated the first amateur radio station from space. He used his station’s call sign, W5LFL, to connect with about 250 ham operators, including his mother in Enid, Okla.; Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona; and King Hussein of Jordan.

…

His marriage to Helen Walker in 1952 ended in divorce. In addition to his son Richard, his survivors include three other children from that marriage, Randall, Robert and Linda Garriott; his wife, Evelyn (Long) Garriott; three stepchildren, Cindy Burcham, Bill Eyestone and Sandra Brooks; 12 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Happy Pi Day!

Thursday, March 14th, 2019

Yes, there is pie: a bunch for work, and a bunch more to take down to the CPA class tonight.

Posted in Food, Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 8, 2019.

Friday, March 8th, 2019

Ralph Hall, former Republican House rep from Texas.

Mr. Hall was 91 when he left the House after 34 years. He was defeated in a Republican primary runoff in 2014 by John Ratcliffe, a former United States attorney less than half his age.
An avid jogger who began his days with two-mile runs, Mr. Hall celebrated Memorial Day 2012, when he was 89, by skydiving. That Christmas he became the oldest member of the House, breaking the record set by Charles Manly Stedman of North Carolina, who died in office in 1930 at the age of 89 years, seven months and 25 days.

…

Mr. Hall, who flew Hellcat fighters during World War II, was known in Congress for promoting NASA and energy production. Hailing from a small town east of Dallas, he was fond of saying that he often voted with his party but always voted with his district.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Jerry Merryman. You’ve probably never heard of him, but to my mind, he was one of the great men of history.

While working at Texas Instruments, Mr. Merryman co-created the first pocket calculator.

With this device, Mr. Merryman and his collaborators, Jack Kilby and James Van Tassel, also pioneered rechargeable batteries and “thermal printing,” which used heat to print numbers onto a special kind of paper. Speaking with NPR, Mr. Merryman said he was reminded of their work whenever he used a cellphone or was handed a thermally printed receipt by a grocery store cashier.

…

Years later, when a friend mentioned that Mr. Merryman had designed the calculator’s circuitry in only three days, Mr. Merryman leaned toward him and said, “And three nights.”
He, Mr. Kilby and Mr. Van Tassel initially built a prototype, which spanned an entire room at their Texas Instruments lab. Then, over the next two years, they packed the same circuit design into a hand-held casing using microchips.
The device had 18 keys, and it could handle addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, printing calculations on a tiny spool of paper. It reached the market in 1970 after Texas Instruments licensed the technology to Canon, carrying a $400 price tag. Soon a second partner, Bowmar, introduced a $250 version called the Bowmar Brain.

The first calculator I ever used only supported six digits (not eight) and the basic math operations. I don’t know how much it cost. I think my dad paid around $300 for a Rockwell scientific calculator sometime in the 1970s. It wasn’t that many years later that I got a TI-30 for Christmas: I think by that time they were somewhere around $20 or $30.

Moore’s Law, man.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 16, 2019.

Wednesday, January 16th, 2019

I wanted to give the Carol Channing obit a chance to shake out before posting it. I’m kind of glad I did: now they’re leading off the obit with the Hirschfeld drawing, which fills me with delight down to the bottom of my coal black heart.

By the time she returned to the role on Broadway in October 1995, Ms. Channing had played Dolly more than 4,500 times, missing only one performance — in June of that year, when she left the show for a day to fly to New York from San Diego to accept a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. She had appeared onstage in a cast, a neck brace and a wheelchair, and with viruses that would have felled anyone with lesser determination. (By her own count, she went on to surpass the 5,000 mark.)

…

Ms. Channing’s own motion picture career never really took off, although she received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe for her performance in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (1967). She did enjoy some success on television, and in her later years she did a lot of cartoon voice-over work. But the theater was her natural home.

As Lawrence pointed out to me yesterday, she was also in “Skidoo“. (Honest to Ghu, I thought that had been released on Criterion, but apparently not.)

This one goes out to my friend Todd: Alan R. Pearlman, synthesizer pioneer and founder of ARP Instruments.

ARP’s analog synthesizers — particularly the compact, portable ARP Odyssey, introduced in 1972 — grew ubiquitous in pop and electronic music. By the mid-1970s, ARP was the leading synthesizer manufacturer, commanding 40 percent of the market and outselling its predecessors and competitors, Moog and Buchla.
ARP sounds were central to numerous songs, including Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein,” Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon,” Kraftwerk’s “The Robots,” Underworld’s “Rez,” Nine Inch Nails’ “The Hand That Feeds” and the early-1980s version of the theme to the television series “Doctor Who.”
The five-note signature motif of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was played on an ARP 2500 synthesizer, which is seen in the film. An ARP 2600, mixed with natural sounds, provided the voice of R2-D2 in the first “Star Wars” movie.

Posted in Geek, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 23, 2018.

Sunday, December 23rd, 2018

Audrey Geisel, the second (and surviving) wife of Dr. Seuss.

Timothy C. May, noted cypherpunk. I never met Tim May, but I was on the cypherpunks list, and an avid reader of sci.crypt, back during the peak of the movement. It’s a little strange to see someone who is perhaps most famous as a provocateur on mailing lists get an obit in the NYT, but…

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »