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Bruce Schneier’s latest CryptoGram contains this great soundbite:
Honestly, security experts don’t pick on Microsoft because we have some fundamental dislike for the company. Indeed, Microsoft’s poor products are one of the reasons we’re in business. We pick on them because they’ve done more to harm Internet security than anyone else, because they repeatedly lie to the public about their products’ security, and because they do everything they can to convince people that the problems lie anywhere but inside Microsoft.
A number of people whose sites I frequent lamented the year 2001, as if some ‘2001' entity had caused them to have a bad time for most of the past 12 months. I’ll admit to having burned a calendar in effigy at one recent New Year’s celebration, but in truth I believe that anyone who is struggling to find highlights for the past year is bound to repeat the exercise 52 weeks from now.
In 2001 I achieved a number of exciting things — one of which I’d been talking about for years but begun to question whether I’d ever actually accomplish. In a word, I got fit. I changed my diet, began exercising, and lost more than 15 lbs. I must have changed my metabolism too, because during my recent trip to Europe I ate just about everything in sight for 10 days, yet came home weighing less than I had when I left. (Either that, or someone reset the scale at the gym.)
In 2001 I wrote 232 items for this journal, the traffic to which increased tenfold over the course of the year, thanks to terrific readers such as you, and lots more at googlebot.com.
In 2001 I released my weblog software — my first piece of open-source software.
In 2001 I took excellent vacations to Germany, Amsterdam,St. Louis, Sun River, Canada, Sonoma, San Diego, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. I saw two fantastic music shows, Stomp and the Blue Man Group. And I ‘ran into’ two local musicians of note, Mickey Hart and Tom Waits. Heh.
In 2001 I changed most of my house’s lighting to fluorescent, and reduced my consumption of electricity dramatically. My wife and I also managed to complete two remodeling projects that had been in the works for far too long, and which I continue to appreciate daily.
In 2001 I baked about 200 loaves of bread, and I was told by at least 3 people (who had mouths full of my pizza at the time) that I should dump my engineering gig and open a pizzeria.
To round out the year I replaced a flaky and noisy old webserver with a new machine that is about 3x faster and one-tenth as loud.
Looking forward, I’ve made a number of challenging resolutions for 2002, one of which is to not let this journal go unattended for weeks at a time. How am I doing so far?
The sequel to an outstanding book, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon tells the story of Earth during the time between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. As with the first Shadow, this novel tells the story of Bean, a genetically-enhanced genius and ex-soldier from Battle School.
If you’ve read the other books in this series, you’ll have to read this one too. It is a compelling story, although it contains too much politics and not enough science fiction for my tastes.
Patronize these links, man:
If you are interested in cryonics (freezing of heads or bodies in hopes that future science will discover ways to revive the “corpsicle”) or nanotechnology, you will find this book challenging, rewarding, and significant.
I can’t say this was a fabulous story, in terms of its appeal strictly as a work of fiction, but I believe it will stay with me longer than most of the stuff I read. This book has a lot more to offer than a romp through the future; it is the sort of book that will be used in college Philosophy and Literature classes.
Of special interest to fans of speculative fiction is Halperin’s afterword, which includes a bibliography for further reading about the science within the story.
Patronize these links, man:
I love restaurants, but going out to eat in Germany is not much fun. Besides the fact that everything on the menu used to have four legs and hair, the air inside restaurants in noxious with cigarette smoke.
In California, smoking in public is nearly outlawed. I have lived here for so long that I can’t stand to be around cigarettes any more. When people smoke, my eyes dry out like old granola. It is nearly as unpleasant as having one’s brain fitted for custom earplugs — but that is a story for another time.
Swimming through the blue cloud of acrid smoke that forms within minutes of any social gathering, I have to blink repeatedly, squint, and hold my hands over my bleeding red eyes, just to maintain vision through the film forming on my contacts. I’d done so much of this during my stay in Germany that my wife’s uncle, upon greeting me on New Year’s Eve, performed a sort of exaggerated squint, clenching the top half of his face together as he shook my hand. I thought this parody of my suffering was really insensitive, until I saw him do it when he greeted someone else — and then I saw his brother do it too! I guess they were also feeling distress from the smoke (even though they were making some of it).
Cigarettes are an integral part of German food culture. They enable a diner to algebraically scale any meal into 2n+1 courses. For example, at this New Year’s Eve party, I had a three-course meal, while most everyone else in the room enjoyed seven (cigarette, appetizer, cigarette, soup, cigarette, entree, cigarette). And while I had only one dessert, everyone else had three (cigarette, mousse, cigarette).
Relief came suddenly at midnight when the room emptied of bodies, and in the wake of the exodus, smoke. I was shocked to think everyone had bailed on the evening so quickly, as if all their BMWs and Audis were about to turn into whatever passes for seasonal gourds over there… and then I realized that no one had left; they’d simply gone outside to attempt to set the Earth on fire.
And so I discovered that the Germans’ preoccupation with cigarettes is only in part due to a national addiction to nicotine. I think the more general issue is a fascination with combustion, for this crowd of well-dressed revelers descended on the parking lot like schoolkids to light firecrackers, roman candles, and rockets of all kinds. They had missiles, fountains, mortars, and scary whizzing things that shot sparks in the air, into the garden, and at the spectators. Several of these went under cars in the parking lot — I was afraid they’d generate a bigger bang than anyone expected. I stepped away from the window at this point.
The next morning, sidewalks all over town looked like a war zone. I blew off a lot of fireworks as a child, but I have never seen anything like this — every square foot of sidewalk was littered with soggy cardboard, plastic fins and nosecones, red tissue paper, and burn marks. For a country that is generally cleaner and better maintained than America, this was incongruous and a bit disturbing. I did not see a clean patch of pavement anywhere on January 1st. I was told that Germans had spent 300 million Deutschmarks (about $150 million US) on fireworks for the day.
