Paralipsis

This just in, eating food makes you fat, exercise makes you hungry.

The one thing that might be said about exercise with certainty is that it tends to makes us hungry. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Burn more calories and the odds are very good that we’ll consume more as well. And this simple fact alone might explain both the scientific evidence and a nation’s worth of sorely disappointing anecdotal experience.

If you want to be thin, eat less. Yeah, the hacker diet works, but eating less is hard when food tastes so good.

Marcus Ranum has an excellent article which I find myself going back to often, it’s titled The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. My favorite is number five, Educating Users.

On the surface of things, the idea of “Educating Users” seems less than dumb: education is always good. On the other hand, like “Penetrate and Patch” if it was going to work, it would have worked by now.

This ties directly into password policies as users (in the aggregate) have shown themselves to be completely incapable of managing something as complex as passwords and authentication. For several years now I’ve been operating a lab with a very simple password policy. Your password is random and no, you can’t change it. It works because every human I’ve encountered thus far, when asked to type in a string of 8 completely random symbols on a daily basis rather quickly memorizes it. For those who do not log in on a daily basis, they are the ones most likely to pick duplicate or otherwise insecure passwords, or write it down anyway. So, they have a slip of paper that says ‘your password is:’ anyway, it just happens to be a good one.

And yes, I have been tracking the number of password resets requested, and no, there aren’t very many. Also, those that do get reset, are often repeat customers who never bother to keep track of their password in the first place.

An excellent article, Animals Are Not Things which describes animal welfare from a very pragmatic point of view. My favorite quote:

I am not required to keep a pair of screwdrivers in my toolbox, so that they can socialize with other screwdrivers.

Although, I should point out that I have several dozen screwdrivers in my screwdriver drawer. Therefore my bases are covered should we discover that we are wrong about them. (I for one welcome our new robot masters.)

Para Publishing has a fascinating collection of statistics about the book publishing industry.

A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.

A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.

59% of the customers plan to purchase a specific book when entering a bookstore.

40% make impulse purchases.

2002: Of the $23.7 billion spent on books, only $10.7 billion is spent in bookstores. The non-traditional outlets sell more books.

Project Blackbox by Sun is certainly a fascinating concept. The infrastructure needs are significant, and what would be truly awesome is if they came up with a standardized set of quick-release power and cooling couplers. That would make this a truly useful piece of technology. Nicholas Carr’s comments regarding the utilitization of electricity and its applicability to computing are quite correct.

You can always read the NY Times take on it, but I doubt the link will work for very long and I’m always disappointed in the quality of the reporting when I read a times article about something I do know about.

Photo from Aaron Cohen’s blog.

Working at a university, I can only say that The Freshmen is stunningly true.

On the first day of class he asks them a question. “What would you be doing if you were not in College?” They reply that they would be working in a retail store, construction, or at the paper mill in their hometown. “So you would be working 40 hours a week? Is that correct?” he says. They answer in the affirmative. He then goes on to guarantee that if they will work a 40-hour week in college, they will be successful. He asks them to “work” in their academic pursuits 8 hours a day, five days a week, with evenings and weekends off. The 40 hours must be spent either in class or in study time. He explains that if they would get up at 7 a.m., eat breakfast, and either attend class or study from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with an hour off for lunch, they would have every evening off to socialize. They would also have their weekends free. He knows that this will work. He also knows that they won’t take his advice.

Interesting article on rules and rule breaking in the Moscow Times.

Put simply, Russians are used to not making a connection between breaches of rules and laws and their tragic consequences. Breaking the rules has long been a flourishing subculture that can be witnessed everywhere you turn.

The Moscow Times requires a pay subscription to read their content (sucks), but you can read more excerpts at Tom McMahon’s blog. Ignore the 4-block world thing, the content is below that.

John Mueller, over at Ohio State University has a wonderful paper about the current phenomenon regarding the demise of war. He discusses the issue in detail, but being a political scientist (and student of Fred Astaire choreography), he doesn’t dwell long on the whole aspect of enconomic ties being a significant depressant to the desire for war. Regardless, the paper is a good, and heartening read. Especially in light of recent events.

Mueller is also the author of the False Sense of Insecurity paper that has been making the rounds of late. You can download many of his papers, and even a couple of his books off of his OSU web page.

Over at TV-In-Japan, aside from a crappy web layout, they have a clip from youtube that is an example of everything that is right and wrong with Japanese TV and culture. According to the comments, the user kazuhima has several more of the same available on his youtube account.

A delightfully suggestive advertisement by a lubricant company. Hell, it’s more than suggestive, it’s downright dirty.