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Swedish chef vs. Google Voice

Last weekend my brother told me to call him at a new number, and say anything to his voicemail. I did. Then he pulled out his iPhone to show how incredibly well it had transcribed the message. To his surprise, it hadn’t transcribed it at all. He then spent the next five minutes figuring out how to listen to the audio.

Today he informed me that Google had finally transcribed the message. Here it is.

(In his view, it underlines the words as the audio plays. Unless they add that feature to the public view, you’ll just have to guess.)

Forging the Mona Lisa with a paint roller

This picture of Betelgeuse is rather blurry. But that can be forgiven, since it’s 600 light years away. Or can it? How hard is it to see something that distant?

Consider measuring the moon by holding your hand out and squeezing your thumb and first finger like a caliper. It’s cloudy today, but I’d guess it would be slightly less than an inch from thumb to finger.

Betelgeuse is one of two stars marking the hunter’s shoulders in the constellation Orion, but it’s not practical to conduct this experiment. Which is why we have math. It’s about 600 light years away, and as wide as the orbit of Jupiter (light takes 80 minutes to cross from one side to the other.) Assuming the distance from your eye to your hand is one meter, you would need to hold your thumb and finger about a nanometer apart.

That distance is the length of ultraviolet light wave. But that picture was taken using infrared– with a thousand times the wavelength. That’s like painting fine art with a really wide paint roller.

[Sylvia was watching Jordan and me do these calculations last night. With luck she learned that math is fun and useful for grown-ups.]

Full body scanners wouldn’t have caught the underwear bomber

Why doesn’t the press or the blogosphere pick up on these sorts of things? (They report it, but forget it instantly.) The virtual strip search that people have been talking about would detect an unusual dense device, but can’t tell an explosive from a wallet. (I suppose if the underwear bomber had expected a full-body scan, he could have hidden the explosives in Depends.)

For that matter, we seem to have forgotten that you can do a lot more damage with box cutters than a bomb. What we need is not more security: we need more perspective. Terrorism, at its worst, kills fewer people than car accidents, murder, high blood pressure, lightning, or just about anything else that actually kills people every year.

I’m in agreement with Bruce Schneier on this one: the airport security worked, in that it forced the terrorists to use small, hard-to-detonate bombs– thereby making it likely that passengers will notice and defuse them. Without airport security, it would have been a standard-issue, tried-and-true suicide bomber vest. Which is to say, airport security stops the low-budget and the me-too attacks but will never be able to stop a cunning, highly organized attacker.

WEIRD societies

New acronym for the social sciences: WEIRD, or Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. The notion (hardly new) is that most research is done on WEIRD people, and may not be applicable to most of the people on the planet.

Sylvia starts Kindergarten

Last Thursday, Sylvia started school at Park Spanish Immersion, the local public school for English speakers whose parents want them to learn Spanish. This morning at the school bus stop she taught the whole family a convoluted counting song she’s learned. It’s the kind where you add a motion with each verse, until it’s impossible to keep up without just convulsing randomly. (Not long after cinco, in this case.)

Most districts in the Twin Cities seem to have a Spanish immersion schools, and there are plenty of other languages available in the public schools. You can thank open enrollment, whereby Minnesota students can apply to any school, regardless of where they live. (Busing is only available within one’s home district, though.)

Bene Gesserit

With apologies to Frank Herbert, as well as all of you who actually drink beer.

I’ll have a beer
Beer is the brain-killer
Beer is the little drink that brings total obliteration
I will drink my beer.
I will permit it to pass into me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will drain the inner keg and see its path
Where the beer has gone there will be nothing.
Only I remain.

Refried Beans for a small army

This is my recipe for the refried beans in my bean and cheese burrito every day. It started out as a way to reduce my salt intake, but now Jordan relies on it for a midnight snack. I make as much as will fit in my pressure cooker, which is enough for about 8 lunches and a week of midnight snacks. It is inspired by recipes in Pressure Perfect by Lorna Sass. (An excellent cookbook, several of the recipes are regular dinners in our home.)

Makes 9 cups, about 10 generous servings.

Add to pressure cooker:

  • 4 cups dried black or pinto beans
  • 2 T vegetable oil very important
  • 1 T garlic powder or granulated garlic
  • 1 t salt

Fill the cooker to the half-way mark with water, seal the cooker, and bring it to pressure. Once the pressure regulator is rocking gently, cook for 30 minutes for black beans, or 40 minutes for pinto. To cook, place the cooker in the sink and run cold water over it until the pressure valve releases.

WARNING: if you forget the oil, the beans will foam and clog the pressure cooker. The cooker will explode, causing burns and severe injury to anyone in the vicinity. Don’t forget the oil! (This hasn’t happened to me.)

While the beans are cooking, fry until the oil is fragrant and colorful:

  • 12 dried arbol chile peppers (available in the Hispanic section of the grocery store.)
  • 3T or a vast, unmeasured quantity of vegetable oil

Set aside the chiles. If you like your beans mild, discard them and keep the flavored oil. I use a huge amount of oil, mainly Smart Balance and/or olive oil. It makes the beans smoother and more filling, so I don’t crave more cheese or other less healthy sources of calories.

In a large sauce pan, fry in the oil until onion is limp:

  • 1 large (2-3 C) onion
  • 1 T whole cumin, or 1/2 T ground

Add, and fry until onion is lightly browned:

  • 1/2 T dried oregano

In a food processor, mix the onions, beans, and some or all of the arbol peppers. This will take several batches. Mix the batches under medium heat in the saucepan, adding water and/or liquid from the cooker. Keep in mind that the beans will get thicker as they cool. If desired, add more salt to taste.

Hit by DSL modem virus?

Recently a worm has been spreading that infects DSL modems. It is a harbinger of things to come. There are all sorts of other internet-enabled devices which are configured through a nearby computer. At our office, we’ve got new telephones that operate on the same principle.

This worm lets itself be known by blocking the most common ports on the modem– essentially blocking network access. That’s exactly what happened sometime between Friday night and Saturday afternoon. And yet, on further inspection, it looks like it wasn’t this worm. For one thing, someone claiming to be the worm’s author claims to have shut it down a week ago. For another, I was ultimately able to determine that both the hardware and software were wrong (but the manufacturer didn’t help.) And finally, the worm apparently attacks only from outside your home network.

This has reminded me of how insecure these network-attached devices are. I assumed I wasn’t vulnerable, now I’m not so sure. In the old days network attached modems, printers, and other such devices were built using custom chips that were difficult to break into either because they couldn’t be updated remotely, or because few possessed the specialized knowledge to program a particular device. These days, these devices are built on top of a standard set of software and hardware which isn’t much different from a PC. Someone who knows how to program Linux has a head start in figuring out how to modify a network-attached device.

Manufacturers assume that as long as administrative access is limited to the local network, the device is safe. My DSL modem even has the administrative password printed on its bottom, along with other information they expect you’ll never change. But there’s no guarantee that a laptop inside the network hasn’t already been infected, and from there it could guess the password and infect the modem.