http://rightshift.info Bionic Raptors ate this taglir:... Mon, 09 Aug 2010 03:50:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Hello, reader. An offering, for your perusal: It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal math in this country. The National Security ... http://rightshift.info/?p=463 GROSS-ALERT: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS IMAGES AND VIDEOS CONSIDERED TOO GROSS FOR YOUNG AND SENSITIVE VIEWERS. DISCRETION ADVISED. So my parents bought a new cot made of a variety of jungle hardwood that has proven notoriously difficult to identify. A few months into the purchase, strange periodic noises emanating from ... http://rightshift.info/?p=438 There are presumably many clever, interesting and useful tools and ideas in science and math modeling. The concept of scaling, though, is the most powerful one I've seen in that it makes very nontrivial predictions with just small helpings of information. Let's start at the top. To scale an object means ... http://rightshift.info/?p=414 Somewhat out of character, this will be a pseudo-meta-post with near-zero original content. Let us begin with what I read in the papers today: (Ahem) Even economics majors reacted with a face-palm (>>). Humour aside, what really got me into writing about something this clichéd and media-hijacked is humanity's blatant amnesia at ... http://rightshift.info/?p=393 Ever since KVM posted his dissection of Rubel's UDE paper, I've been wanting to address this issue he raised: I'm still amazed and can't quite fully digest the fact that a perfectly smooth function can be non-analytic. I mean, consider the exp(-1/x) function. If you stand at the origin, you have ... http://rightshift.info/?p=234 The following is an essay I wrote elaborating upon the power of plain text as a digital medium. I love text based data formats; I work with plain text for nearly everything. I love working at a shell- GUIs frustrate me. I am not an authority on the ... http://rightshift.info/?p=216 Look what Dad brought back from his trip to Germany! [caption id="attachment_204" align="aligncenter" width="491" caption="o_0"][/caption] Apollo Optik. An expensive, and an unknown brand to me. But to my delight, I discovered that they were polarized!! For the uninitiated, light is a self-propagating electromagnetic field disturbance. I'm tempted to call it sourceless, but fact ... http://rightshift.info/?p=203 This tiny post was originally conceived to appear in  "Really Cool Derivations", the working title for an unpublished study companion meant to pain young upper middle-class students from semi-orthodox Indian families who weren't romantic enough to indulge in the arts and were consequently conscripted into training for entrance exams conducted ... http://rightshift.info/?p=171 In the novel *Cryptonomicon*, one of the lead characters finds himself implicated in a (comical) drug bust, and is placed in a jail cell under the watchful (electronic) eyes of hi-tech eavesdroppers. It's a scene out of a spy novel (although *Cryptonomicon* isn't quite that), minus the secret agents, plus ... http://rightshift.info/?p=138 An interesting note from six months ago that I never got around to posting. 'tis a bit vague, but then so is the source. Besides, I like to think that nebulousness has its share of merits- trickster makes this world, after all. *** A while ago, it was thought that the trick ... http://rightshift.info/?p=129