Ed Brayton not only writes the widely read blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars but is also the person who manages the business end of the Freethought Blogs site and keeps the whole thing running smoothly.
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A friend recently sent me this very short video clip. It briefly tells the love story of a middle-aged couple in rural Sri Lanka who have been married for 34 years and live and work on their own small tea plantation.
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On April 7, 2014 we learned of a vulnerability in the OpenSSL security system that you know is in operation when the webpage begins with https instead of http. It is the encryption system used to protect confidential information such as passwords and most sites that deal with sensitive information use it. This vulnerability allowed third parties to intercept and get that information.
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Everyone is (or should be) familiar with the infamous Nigerian 419 scam in which people write to you saying that there is this enormous fortune that needs to be taken out of some country and that if you are willing to assist, you will get a share of the proceeds. Everyone has received them would have noticed how poorly written these appeals are but as I explained earlier, that crudity is deliberate because the appeals have to be such as to not elicit a response from people who are likely to discover that it is bogus before they have parted with any money. Those people are a waste of the scammers’ time. The scammers want to only get responses from the really naïve.
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After I posted that video about how dogs react to magic, I received an email from professional magician Rick Lax with a link to a video where he tried doing similar tricks with cats. The results were quite different, as you can see.
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Last Wednesday I wrote about the strange experience that I had with my computers three years ago when the camera light would unexpectedly come on and stay on until I put it into sleep mode or shut it down. This problem baffled even senior engineers at Apple but then the problem disappeared just as suddenly and inexplicably as it started.
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Sri Lanka played an excellent final game and managed to defeat the favored India quite comfortably. After winning the 50-over World Cup in 1996, Sri Lanka had reached the final in world championships four times before (twice in the 50-over format in 2007 and 2011 and twice in the 20-over format in 2009 and 2012) and lost in all of them, twice to India. So although they have been consistently strong over the last decade, they needed to overcome the feeling that they had lost the ability to win the big game.
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A magician shows dogs a treat that he has in his hands and then makes it ‘disappear’. The reaction of the dogs is amusing but I hope they gave the dogs the treats after the camera stopped rolling. I don’t like to tease dogs. They are so trusting.
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Like many older people, I tend to find some new ways of speaking grating. I still wince at the increasingly common use of the response “I am doing good” when someone is asked how they are. The same with “I could care less”. And the word ‘nucular’ drives me up the wall. I am not enough of a rude pedant to actually correct people when they speak like that, taking such liberties only with my own children when they pick up these ways of speaking from their friends.
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