Not much of a refrigerator, practically speaking, but the end of the video has a really nice, concise discussion of how the tendency towards chaos drives all work in our universe.
Tag: technology
DUNGEON!!!
My son has been at “Rocks & Robots” camp this week (mostly building
sumo-wrestling robots with Mindstorms, plus two half-days of rock climbing), and apparently he and several other kids have developed a species of spoken-word text-based adventure that they play over lunch, called “Dungeon!!!” The game starts with someone saying something along the lines of “You are in a cage hanging from a rusted chain, and realize the cage door is not actually locked. What do you do?” Whoever else is sitting around is in the party and starts asking questions and making decisions. No gold, no XP, no dice, no pencil, no paper—just you and the Dungeon.
But the best thing, IMHO, is that in order to look around the room you say ls (the *nix command to get a list of the contents of the current directory, like dir in DOS).
Why?
“Because it’s easier than saying ‘I look around the room,’ or whatever. And sounds cooler.”
And, yes, he did indeed “Get the idea from computers.”
*headshake* Poor lil nerd don’t even have a notion of the basic framework of what is and is not cool.
Three Thoughts on Nukes: The Parable of the Six Fishes, the Demon Core, and the 10,000 Dead Americans We Don’t Care About
one
Roger Fisher’s idea for making the decision to use nuclear weapons less abstract (from March 1981 @BulletinAtomic): pic.twitter.com/h7arl36sKE
— Stephen Schwartz (@AtomicAnalyst) December 2, 2015
Which reminds me of a story Penn Jillette used to tell. He and Teller were scheduled to appear on TV (maybe Letterman?), and so they prepared a new twist on a classic trick: You take a volunteer’s watch, put it in a bag, smash it, dump out the tattered remains, do some patter, and then make the watch reappear whole and ticking. In their version for Letterman (or whoever), they were going to take the host’s watch, smash it, then wheel out a big aquarium, and sprinkle the parts in the water, where they’d dissolve and the fish would eat them. The host would freely select one of the fish, Teller would scoop it out with a net, they’d gut and and ta-da!, there would be the whole, ticking watch in the fish’s guts!
But the network standards folks wouldn’t let them do that trick; it’d be too brutal to have an animal killed on screen. So Penn and Teller re-jiggered the trick: Instead of an aquarium full of live fish, they’d wheel out a fishmonger’s ice table with six dead fish on it. They’d take the host’s watch, smash it, sprinkle the bits in the ice, the bits would dissolve, the host would freely select a dead fish, and Teller’d fillet it to reveal the watch. Standards loved it, the host loved it, and that’s what went on live TV.
The point of the story—which is the sort of thing that belongs in an atheist’s Bible—is that 
everyone was more comfortable with six fish dying instead of one, provided they didn’t have to watch. Perhaps this is why, if we are to have a death penalty, we should televise it. Perhaps viewing should be mandatory. Perhaps the president should be forced to kill one patriot before he or she kills 10,000 abstract men, women, and children.
two
Consider The Demon Core and the sacrifices researchers make (occasionally heroic, but almost always mundane, and very often totally unforeseeable). I’m mostly putting this here because I’d first heard about this when I was a kid, and realized that many folks hadn’t–and further, that most folks don’t realize what a duct-tape-and-butterknives affair science really is. We imagine clean labs and specialized gear, but in real life it’s a lot of tupperware and dirty countertops. A few folks are celebrated for the “Eureka!”s, and even fewer die terrible (but instructive) deaths. The vast majority toil steadfastly day after day to further human progress one negative result at a time—so that we can go onto to totally disregard their hard-won findings because an actor or know-nothing shouted something demonstrably false at the top of their lungs just long enough to fool our just-half-a-step-from-monkey brains.
three
I hasten to add that, having protested the continuing operation of a damaged Fermi II back in the 1990s and edited a textbook about Chernobyl, I am now nonetheless firmly pro-nuclear energy. As a species, we need a lot of electricity, and we’re gonna need even more to dig ourselves out of the slow climate avalanche that’s going to kill us. The way we currently generate bulk electricity kills tens of thousands of people annually (for example, air pollution from burning coal kills more than 10,000 people each year just in the US)—and that’s when it’s working as intended. Even taking into account the inevitability of the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl, we’re still better off with the Demon Core than the Devil We Know.
Drawing with Sound on an Oscilloscope
No CGI, no digital effects, no computer even; just some electrical testing equipment and an audio recording. Pretty neat and a lot of fun to watch—so neat and fun that I was, in fact, pretty dubious at first. So I borrowed an oscilloscope from my local public library and tried it out—AND IT WORKED!
Here’s Jerobeam Fenderson’s explanation of the effect, and another article with several neat videos.
Here’s Fenderson’s older “Drawing Mushrooms” video, which is the one I tested myself:
STEP 1: Stare at the crosshairs; STEP 2: See demons! o_O
Just a reminder that this is a thing, and your brain is basically a bunch of bullshit neurons playing telephone.
(See also: “Wikipedia: Flashed Face Distortion Effect” and “io9: An explanation for why your peripheral vision is completely borked“)
Thing I Learned: Check Your Damn Gas Cap!
After a long trip, the dashboard of our Scion xD lit up like a Non-Denominational Gift Giving Holiday Display.
🙁
Since this is our “good” car (in contrast to our Prius with the bum AC, which is miserable for summer road trips), I high-tailed it to the mechanic, terrified that we’d done Something Bad to the car that we’re relying to get us through at least another two years (at which time our youngest can enroll in public school, freeing up $1200/month for an auto payment on something big enough for us all to not drive each other to the brink of murder during every damn road trip).
Fortunately:
- Our mechanic (Rons’s Garage, God-of-yr-Choosing bless ’em!) is fantastically honest and
- It was nothing
So why the light display?
We’d left the gas cap off.
We fueled up as we rolled back into town, as my wife needed the car for work the next day (a ~30 mile drive). And we hadn’t screwed the cap down all the way. A loose cap makes the car’s computer believe there’s an air leak somewhere in the fuel system (’cause there is–around the lose cap. If you’re wondering why the car gives a damn: To ruy efficiently, you need to maintain a proper fuel-air ratio in the engine, and it’s easiest to control this if you have a sealed fuel system. On top of that, petrol fumes are bad news for the environment, so many car’s additionally check for leaks just to make sure you aren’t wrecking up the joint with stray hydrocarbons).
The car can run basically fine like this, and there’s no real danger of damaging the engine. Put the fuel cap back on, reset the warning light, and all is well.
The lesson: If your car is throwing a CHECK ENGINE light, make sure the gas cap is tight. If it’s loose (or you lost it), then tighten it down (or replace it), and keep driving. If there’s nothing obvious wrong (no sluggishness or weird noises) and it isn’t nearly time for an oil change, you’ll be fine, and the light will reset itself within 100 miles. If it stays on, then go to the mechanic.
Ron didn’t charge me, because he’s a solid dude (which is why I keep going there). But plenty of guys would charge you for figuring it out (they did spend time pulling the code from the car’s computer and troubleshooting my dumbassery), and a few would even use this as an excuse to “repair” some “major problem.”
I Have Been Pwned; You Probably Have, Too (Alt Title: “God Fucking Dammit, LinkedIn!!!”)
THE SHORT VERSION
If you use LinkedIn, then your email and LinkedIn password have probably been compromised. If you reuse the same password across several sites, then you are likely a total sitting duck waiting to get exploited. Go change passwords NOW!
THE LONG VERSION
This breach seems to have gotten less press than usual, even though it’s liable to have a broader impact on folks, so I want to make sure it’s on everyone’s radar:
An enormous hack of LinkedIn accounts has surfaced (details). Crackers snagged ~164mil login credentials; since the passwords were stored as a unsalted hashes (i.e. “not securely”), the vast majority of these passwords were cracked.
I took the liberty of checking a couple friend/client email addresses while I checked mine (using this tool), and found that most of the emails I checked were included in the hack (as was I). LinkedIn hasn’t proactively informed anyone I’ve contacted about this. So, I’m spreading the word.
The immediate problem is losing control of your LinkedIn account (which, let’s be real, doesn’t necessarily mean much for most people). The bigger problem is that many folks reuse the same password on many sites. If the email:password you used on LinkedIn is the same as the one you used on Twitter or Facebook or Gmail, then those accounts are now also up for grabs. While a LinkedIn account may be of limited value to criminals, a Twitter or Gmail account can be much more useful, and a bank or credit card account—let’s not dwell on it. Did you start changing passwords yet? Go change passwords NOW.
THINGS TO DO RIGHT NOW
- Go here (Yeah, it looks sketchy; it’s legit) https://haveibeenpwned.com/
- Plug in the email address you use to log into LinkedIn (or any email you use to log in to any site; this service tracks many data breaches)
- If you get a green bar, you lucked out. If you get a red bar with “oh no!” in it, continue to step #4
- Read whatever details the site offers about the breach(es) you’ve been included in, and change your password(s) immediately.
- Also set a new password anywhere else that you used that same password
EXTRA CREDIT
Passwords are inherently crappy. It’s just a fact of life. Consider upping your security in two ways:
- Set up “two-factor authentication” (also called “2FA”) on any account that lets you do so. Different sites have different systems (and, alas, call them different things), but they all boil down the same: Once 2FA is set up, logging into your email account (or whatever) will have an extra step. First you enter your username and password and hit submit (like normal). Then they ding your phone (either with a txt or via app) and wait for your to respond (either by clicking “accept” on the app or entering the six digit code they’ve texted you). If you don’t respond, you can’t get in. This makes it impossible for someone to log into your account unless they have your username, password, and your phone. Much more secure. (I’ve added 2FA to several personal web tools I depend on, as I was getting hammered with a brute force attack a couple weeks back.)
- Please seriously consider using a “password manager” or “password locker.” This is a piece of software (or service) that securely stores your usernames and passwords for all of your accounts. That way, you don’t have to chose easily remembered passwords for all of your accounts. Instead, you choose one very good password for your locker, and then let the locker generate insanely hard passwords for your individual accounts (all of my passwords are now 20+ characters long and randomly generated). Lots of folks like LastPass and 1Password. I prefer KeePassX and use MiniKeePass on my phone (I have lots of nit-picky reasons, but the tl;dr: The software implements good encryption algorythms in a secure way; it’s open source and well vetted; it’s not “cloud based”—”the cloud” is just “some other dude’s computer” [with all that implies, viz. security risks], and a cloud computer full of the master keys to folks’ online lives strikes me as an attractive nuisance, at best).
Sorry to be your bad news bear today; I hope you all get green bars and nonetheless CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS, GET A PASSWORD MANAGER, AND START USING 2FA WHENEVER YOU CAN!!!
This is Superrad, but I’m Basically Overrun with Sexbot Jokes Right Now #EmbarrassmentOfPuerileRiches
The most foreboding sentence in the video embedded below–in terms of the obvious teledildonic applications of this tech–has to be: “Predicting the behavior of soft robotic devices is difficult.” Yikes!
For reals, though, there is *a lot* of legit awesome here (both in mainstream R&D and homebrew garage mad-science)–as well as the only legitimately feasibly use of 3D printing I’ve yet seen suggested[*]
Harvard Makes Soft Robotics Open-Source | Motherboard
Robots, the classic symbol of the techno-future, are now bopping around in the suburban garages of most anyone with $40 or so to spend on parts and with a bit of programming acumen, or at least the desire/ability to learn a bit of code.
Thanks to a new toolkit released by researchers at Harvard University, those garage robot tinkerers can now expand into the realm of “soft” robots, e.g. robots made to squish and deform like mechanical slugs or eels.
Thanks to a new toolkit released by researchers at Harvard University, those garage robot tinkerers can now expand into the realm of “soft” robots, e.g. robots made to squish and deform like mechanical slugs or eels.
Here’s a cool lil vid of a pretty evolved example of “soft robotics.” I think this little fella was even programmed to feel pain, regret, and ennui!
Paint Your Nails, Change Your Habits
Here’s the thing about habits and rituals: They are enormously evolutionarily advantageous. We are cognitive misers; making decisions and remembering things take energy (which is finite), and forgetting things can be very costly–even deadly. So, we’re primed to form habits, because they offload this effort. The productivity books and blogs are full of anecdotes about Famous Admirable People establishing rituals to free up their headspace (e.g., Einstein had a closet full of clothes that all matched and never wore socks; he could just dress at random without putting effort into choosing garments).
Any task that you can initiate in under two seconds[1] is not perceived as requiring effort; it easily slips into habit and automation: Putting on a seat belt, switching off a light, grabbing some M&Ms from a bowl on someone’s desk, glancing at a cellphone.[2]
As this little list makes obvious, there are up and downsides to this mechanism, as an unhealthy or downright dangerous habit can form and ossify just as easily as a good one.
So, I love that this guy’s nail-polish hack–by creating a consistent distraction–effectively increases the cognitive effort of the habit up beyond the threshold, so the automation falls. Maintain this consistent cognitive load, and the habit softens up and becomes far more susceptible to modification.
Dirt-Cheap Amplifier Aesthetics and Tweaks: Grills & Fabric, New & Used, Weird-Spec Speakers
One of my goals with the projects in Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred was to present designs that–both in terms of the functional guts and the finish aesthetics–could be adapted to suit both your own tastes and the supplies you could easily get. For example, the grill on the Dirt-Cheap Amp is an old computer power supply fan cover–which just happened to be the perfect size to secure my 8 ohm speaker (itself torn out of a broken Barbie boom box). I’ve also had good luck pulling grills off of old/broken small appliances I’ve gotten for free as resale shop rejects or garage sale leftovers. As far as new sources, check out your local hardware store, where there are many neat vent, drain, and recessed-lighting covers (the plumbing, electrical, and HVAC aisles are always profitable places to search for neat fittings, in my experience).
Upholstering Your Amp
Failing all else, you can cover the front of the amp in fabric (as is standard in the old school Fender guitar amps). When doing a fabric cover, I like to start with a double-layer of nylon window-screen mesh, which protects the paper cone of the speaker from getting dinged. Double up the mesh, then cut a square at least a few inches bigger than your speaker hole and staple it in place around the perimeter of the screen (you can, of course, cover the entire front of your speaker cabinet in screen, which will make your amp look a bit more pro. I sort of like the look of the doubled mesh, but if it doesn’t work for you aesthetically, you can recover it with basically any single layer of fabric (going the Fender Tweed Amp road, for example). In terms of finish, you can pull the fabric all the way around the lid and staple it from behind (thin fabric won’t usually cause you much grief in terms of getting the cigar box to close once you finish). A few brass-headed furniture tacks added to the edging of the front of the fabric cover, or framing it out in thin strips of wood or brass, will give the amp really slick look.
Using Weird Speakers
Folks occasionally ask me if this design–which calls for an 8 ohm speaker–will work with lower impedance speakers. I’ve tested this out, and had the amp work perfectly with 3 and 4 ohm speakers I’ve scrounged out of old boom boxes. I’ve also had decent results with speakers as high as 16 ohms. So, if you’re salvaging parts, feel free to grab those 3, 4, and 6 ohm speakers as well as the 8s. If you find your non-standard speaker distorting, you might wanna monkey around with the pin 1 to pin 8 jumper: some amps built around “non-8” speakers work better with pin 1 and pin 8 connect with plain old wire (as in the base design shown in the book), others work better with that connection omitted altogether, and some need the gain-boost that comes with connecting pins 1 and 8 using an electrolytic capacitor (as described in the “Tweaking the Amp” section of that project).
DIY Music Freebies
UPDATE: You can now get a free “Jam Pack” of musical projects from my first two books!