Since the Edward Snowden revelations a year ago, I have been writing quite a lot about encryption although I don’t know much about it. I came across this introduction to the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system, a common form of what is known as public key cryptography, that was fairly clear about how it worked in converting the plain text message into the encrypted form called the ciphertext.
[Read more…]
When Apple unveiled Siri, its intelligent digital assistant, people were wowed by what it could do. You could ask ‘her’ to set the alarm or call someone or tell you where to go and was able to deflect metaphysical questions with humor.
[Read more…]
The world of mathematics was agog last week with the announcement of the first woman to win the Fields medal, the most prestigious prize in that field, awarded every four years to two to four people. What was additionally noteworthy is that Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor from Stanford University is originally from Iran.
[Read more…]
Jimmy Carter had his faults as president, the main one being his decision to implement what they must have thought was a clever plan to destabilize Afghanistan so as to covertly draw the Soviet Union, its Cold War adversary, into that country and get bogged down so as to create for them their own Vietnam. That set in motion a train of horrific conflict under which the Afghan people still suffer. [IPDATE: See the interview that Zbigniew Bzerzinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, gave in 1998.]
[Read more…]
I used to get terribly car sick as a boy but fortunately it went away by itself in my mid-teens. But I know adults who never get over it and this makes life quite difficult for them. But one thing that has been noted is that of you are the driver of the vehicle, you are less likely to feel sick and people have tried to understand why.
[Read more…]
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution equipped an underwater drone with six cameras to observe shark behavior in the wild off the coast of Mexico. When the great white sharks thought that the drone was either threatening them or was possible prey, the cameras caught some stunning footage of their reaction.
[Read more…]
We know that sound consists of vibrations in the air or other medium transmitting it and that it causes objects on which the waves impinge to also vibrate, even if we cannot see it with the naked eye. But in theory at least, by closely observing the vibrations of the object, you should be able to reconstruct the sound that caused it to vibrate.
[Read more…]
There is a new study out that reinforces a point that I have made repeatedly, that focusing on people’s weight (as measured by the Body Mass Index) instead of their health is the wrong way to go and in fact may be harmful because it discourages people from a healthy lifestyle, despite all its benefits, if it does not result in weight loss. As one of the authors of the study says:
[Read more…]
The word ‘scientist’ is so common and seems so appropriate now that it seems hard to imagine that it is not only of relatively recent coinage but that its introduction was controversial for almost a century. I came across an interesting article that outlined the history of a disputed term that has now become a coveted title.
[Read more…]
One of the many objections given by opponents of same –sex marriage is that children need a mother and a father and that the children of gay parents will suffer from psychological harm. This argument was never properly substantiated and in court case after court case judges have rejected the claim.
[Read more…]