Your people must have an exceptionally short life span. -- Kerr Avon, Blake's 7

IT69: Via Time Travel

Okay, so I just noticed that what with my blog crashing all around me, I skipped ahead a number last week. Bending the space-time continuum, I now bring you the missing episode. IT71 will appear as expected next week, and IT72, as a result of my skilled manipulation, will appear on March 30, 1942.

it69

And now we see the root cause of the New York City ban on using a certain racial epithet.

Thank you for getting me out of that well

Some time, I don’t remember when exactly, early in 1991, my dad brought Sarah home to live with us. She shipped in a cardboard crate with a blue blanket inside it, but, I am told, she rode most of the way on dad’s arm. It was, I think, a good thing that the previous year, he’d traded in his old Subaru for a newer one and switched to an automatic transmission. A few years later, she would wrap her leash around the handbrake, leaving a mark in it that lasted until I finally sent the car to rest in 2002. Westies were popular at the time, and Sarah herself had the distinction of having been born on Christmas day.

Sarah, on her 15th birthday

Sarah was an affectionate puppy. For years, I remember her always greeting me at the door when I got home from school, jumping on me and losing control of her bladder. We were new to dog-ownership and had our various ups and downs. Bred for hunting small game, Sarah had an insatiable desire to dig holes, and I recall that she once dyed herself orange for the better part of a year as she excavated a huge mound of sand we’d had dumped in the back yard to lay a patio behind the house.
For some time, she had some sort of skin condition, that caused her to tear out clumps of her own fur. Her habit of doing this at night while she lay under my parents’ bed eventually led to so much collateral damage to the carpeting that they replaced the floor in their bedroom with commercial tile. Later in her life, she took to sleeping in bed with my mom, and then eventually to sleeping on a mat at the end of the hallway once getting in an out of bed as the mood struck her became more than her hips could handle.
Sarah was for the most part a friendly, well-behaved dog, aside from her unfortunate tendency to snap when startled. She gave my sister a scar on her nose that I don’t think she ever fully forgave her for. Sarah became closest to my mother, and even as she grew old and tired, would usually rouse herself from a half-slumber to follow her from room to room. Once, she changed direction abruptly, and my mother lost her footing and twisted her ankle.
But all things considered, Sarah was a good dog, and we grew to appreciate her even more when, years later, my sister would convince my parents to let her get a second dog, a lab, who still hasn’t calmed down and can’t be left alone for so much as a minute. Sarah and Jamie got on well — we’re fairly sure that on at least one occasion, they actually collaborated to steal a ham sandwich.
When I went away to college, dad liked to tease her that I’d fallen down a well, a little running gag that he’d repeat every time I came back ot the home of my youth.
Because she was small, it was always difficult to think of Sarah as anything other than a puppy, even as she grew old and bouts of arthritis impaired her mobility from time to time. Cataracts took most of her vision, though you couldn’t always tell, except when she went running for the wrought iron gate my parents had installed at the end of the hallway to restrain the lab. Sarah could wriggle under it without much problem, but at a full run, she couldn’t see it until it was too late to stop, and she’d occasionally end up ramming it headlong.
About a week ago, I’m told, she collapsed after her morning walk and had to be carried in. She vacillated between better and worse for a few days, eating little and often too tired to move. Late Tuesday night, Sarah got down off the couch (My parents didn’t care enough about the furniture to keep her off of it until they bought new furniture a few years ago, by which time she was old enough that a policy change would have seemed cruel) and slumped to the floor. Her breathing slowed, and finally stopped. We do not think she suffered. Sarah passed away at about 12:25 AM Wednesday morning of a condition my sister called “Too Many Birthdays”. She was 16 years old, which, depending on who you go by, is either 77 or 112 in dog years.
They laid her to rest beside Jamie. I imagine that they are frolicking together and stealing ham sandwiches in whatever sort of afterlife is reserved for pets.
Sarah Jane Raszewski, December 25, 1990-April 25, 2007. You will be missed. Good dog.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

Every once in a while, the little girl who lives across the alley from me will try to strike up a conversation. This is usually a little uncomfortable for me, because, while when you’re a kid, you’re always warned not to talk to strangers, no one ever tells you, as an adult, whether you’re supposed to talk to strange children. But I guess technically we’re not actually strangers: we’re neighbors. Maybe it’s just a symptom of the times that I should think there was anything at all unnatural about being on conversational terms with the children of the people who live across the alley.
But anyway, the reason I bring it up is to relate this conversation:
Her: (Talks a bit about her love of digging up bugs and worms)
Me: (Polite interest)
Her: What do you love?
Me: (after thinking) Well, I like video games. And movies. And I love my girlfriend.
Her: You’re lucky you have a girlfriend.
Me: Yes I am
Her: If you had three girlfriends, you’d be the luckiest man in the world
Me: (after a bumfuzzled silence) I think one is about all I can handle.

The Blog of Death

So, regular visitors may have noticed some strange error messages last week. Those should be gone for now. I was spammed so hard that the database which runs this blog broke, rather severely. I’ve managed to recover almost all the data to a new database, but the comments table was completely trashed. This means that old comments have been relegated to the status of “ghosts”, and will vanish in the event old pages ever get updated.
How do other bloggers deal with spam? I’ve got spam filters, but those don’t really help: a million spam comments an hour pouring into the Junk folder breaks the DB just as bad as a million a day going to the page — and it’s not just the spam being received that causes the problem: just by the act of hammering the server with their spam, they suck up my bandwidth — and I do mean suck.
Anyway, I’ve got some redirects in place now to divert suspicious activity away from the comments pages. It’s possible that you might accidentally fall into one — make sure you never navigate your way to a page called spider-trap, as you’ll fall permanently into my list of banned IPs.

Cancelled after ten seasons? I can deal.

You scored as SG-1 (Stargate). You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body.

SG-1 (Stargate)
94%
Moya (Farscape)
88%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)
88%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)
88%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)
75%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
75%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)
50%
Serenity (Firefly)
50%
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)
50%
Enterprise D (Star Trek)
50%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)
50%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)
38%

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

If I only had a heart… (Happy 200)

In honor of my 200th post, I thought– well, okay, this has nothing to do with it being my bicentennial; I just noticed it when I clicked on “Entries” and saw the number 199 next to it. So, anyway, on with the post…
You may not know the term, but you’ve probably seen a CAPTCHA by now. The acronym expands out to the not-really-meaningful-unless-you’re-a-CS-guy “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. A bit of background:
Alan Turing, one of the founding bigwigs of the whole theory of computers as we know them, had this theory: If we stick a human being at a terminal of some sort (This was Turing, back in the fifties, so he was thinking of a teletype, but IM would work just as well) and have him chat for a bit with two other entities, one of which is a computer and the other one is a second human, if the guy at the terminal can’t tell which is which, the computer has demonstrated actual human intelligence, or, at least, something close enough to it to be interesting.
So, in a nutshell, a Turing Test is when a human tries to tell whether something else is a computer or a human. This is fairly easy (The human is less likely to say “BZZT! DESTROY ALL HUMANS!” if you annoy it). A CAPTCHA, which is sometimes ambigiously called a “Reverse Turing Test” is when a computer tries to tell if the entity it’s talking to is human or another computer.
That is to say, it’s one of those things you get when you sign up for something on the internet and they show you a picture of some distorted random letters and ask you to type them in.
This is actually a pretty hard test. It’s comparatively easy for one computer to convince another computer that it’s a computer (“Perform these six hundred hard math problems in under a second” is a pretty simple way), but how do you convince it that you’re human? The computer conducting the test can’t measure your capacity to love, or detect if you have opposible thumbs or anything like that — in fact, the reason that it’s so easy for a human to distinguish computers and humans is that humans can perceive a lot of things that computers can’t — which, of course, means that that distinguish a human (taking the test) from a computer (taking the test) are things that the computer (giving the test) can’t perceive.
So, the way to tell the difference is to generate the sort of problem that humans are good at solving and computers aren’t, and ask the test-taker to solve it. Fortunately, a computer can indeed generate problems it can’t solve itself. Or, a human can provide the computer (giving the test) with a crib sheet. The most common kind you see is the kind I mentioned above. Computers are pretty good at reading written words, but not if they’ve been distorted. So you print some letters in an image, mangle them a bit, and ask the test-taker to read them. This is doable, though it’s not all that easy: mangle the letters too much and a human can’t read them. Don’t mangle them enough, and a computer can. Most of the letter-based CAPTCHAs you see on the internet aren’t all that good, and throw up manglings that a very clever computer could work out, though there are some very good letter-mangling CAPTCHAs out there. Also, CAPTCHAs can often foil humans with vision problems (Like my color blindness).
Another CAPTCHA you see sometimes shows you several images and asks, say, “Which one is a puppy”, since that’s a hard thing for a computer to deduce. This works pretty well, but, unlike the letter-mangling test, the computer taking the test can’t generate new pictures of puppies, so unless it’s got a huge stockpile, the computer taking the test could just poke at random until it got in purely by coincidence.
I read a paper about CAPTCHAs back in grad school, and there was a really neat point they made. Unlike all the rest of computer security, if a CAPTCHA is broken, it’s basically great for mankind. Let me explain: You’ve by now probably heard of the animated cursor bug in Windows. No good can come of exploiting the animated cursor bug. There aren’t really useful things you can do by hacking an animated cursor. It’s good for exactly one thing: compromising systems to the owner’s detriment. Cryptography is largely based on number theory. Until modern cryptography was invented there was no practical use for number theory. People studied it purely for love of math. Aside from its mathematically interesting properties, the only practical use for the RSA algorithm is to encrypt data. Which means that if someone discovers a problem with the RSA problem, RSA encryption is broken. The problem itself has no positive use value, beyond breaking cryptosystems. This isn’t the case for a CAPTCHA: if a computer manages to foil a CAPTCHA, it means that the computer can do something which computers are historically bad at. If it can consistently find the puppy, then we have created a computer that can identify puppies, and puppy-identification is a skill with unlimited commercial application. If our computer can consistently read mangled words, then the next generation of business card scanner software will be able to tell that the business card you ran through it isn’t for “Lockheart Martini”.
But this is just a comically longwinded introduction to what I want to show you. Woe be to all of us the day a computer learns how to break the new Hotness CAPTCHA. It uses AmIHotOrNot API to ask users to identify which of several pictures shows the hottest person. Personally, I think they missed a great oppertunity by not calling it amibotornot.com.
The other CAPTCHA I’d like to show you comes to us via Defective Yeti: Internet Access CAPTCHAs. This one is designed to tell whether the testee is a human, a computer, or an idiot. What’s neat about this is that it’s much more likely to be foiled by a clever computer than a stupid human.
Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your porn