Digital Security

Some interesting stories about keeping the government's nose out of your business:

Thought you might find this interesting - https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/06/encryption-works-how-protect-your-privacy-age-nsa-surveillance.
This is hilarious - but smart http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/russian_government_classified_documents_gHajg51WZGeeK1H8F3w6KO.
and this just plain sad and infuriating http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_spy_who_came_in_from_the_c.php. 

From a comment on Stu's blog.

DARPA Robotics Challenge Track A Robots

Not all robots use humanoid forms.

Russian Intercept

Tupolev Tu-22M "Backfire" & Sukhoi Su-27 "Flanker"

Kaliningrad is a small Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania. The Russians have a very narrow flight path between Finland and Estonia that they can use to fly to Kaliningrad. Sometimes their aircraft "stray" off course, people get excited and fighter jets get scrambled to go take a look. These photos are from an "incident" that happened about a month ago.

Update July 2020 replaced dead Picasa slideshow with image and link to Google Photos album.

Oxyana

  OXYANA Trailer from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
Our glorious government is force feeding prisoners at Guantanamo. Can't have them starving to death, that would be wrong? Older son is reading bits from Harper's Magazine: more people committed suicide in the USA last year than were killed in car wrecks. One of the arguments for legalizing drugs is that people wouldn't be killed by accidental overdoses because you would be reasonably well assured that you knew the potency of the drug you were taking. This trailer makes me wonder. I mean Oxycontin is commercially produced, the dosage is well know. So what's going on? Do all Oxycontin pills look alike, even though they are wildly different doses? Are people deliberately killing themselves? Or do they just keep shooting up more and more in hope of getting the really glorious feeling, and eventually they take more than their body can cope with?

The Sand Reckoner's Diagram

Got to thinking about this diagram so I did up this sketch. Noticed that the inside looked like a regular octagon: all the sides are the same length. But to be regular all the angles would have to the same also, and while they all look sort of the same, a little study of the external triangles convinced me that, no, the angles are not the same and so while the inner figure is an octagon, you can't really call it regular.

    All of the lines in the figure are connected: you can draw the entire figure by starting at any vertex and drawing one line after another without lifting your pencil from the paper. This surprised me because the star pattern is one of the first things I learned about working on cars. Most cars have (used to have?) five lug nuts holding the wheels on. To avoid warping the wheel you followed a star pattern when tightening the lug nuts. This was easy with a five pointed star, you could start anywhere and then you just followed the lines as if you were drawing a five pointed star.
   This doesn't work with a wheel with four or six lug nuts. You either go in a circle, or you use two separate sequences of skipping one bolt. So I'm surprised you can reach all points of an octagon by using a star pattern. Guess I never dealt with eight bolt wheels often enough for them to make an impression.

China Flood

July 9, 2013. Heavy flood waters sweep through Beichuan in southwest China's Sichuan province.

Atlas Robot

I'm not sure whether to be impressed or frightened. I mean it's very cool that we are able to build such complex devices, but on the other hand this is all being done by the DEFENSE department.