Passwords

How many PINs and passwords have you put out there a hostage to fortune? Have you been clever, or too clever by half, in your choice? As XKCD illustrated some years ago, a password has to be a) secure b) memorable c) different for each of several sites.
Secure means not using:  1234; your bday, your dog's bday, the word bidet, 'password'; pa55w0rd; your god-daughter's name; your mother's maiden name; any word in any dictionary; backwards or forwards.
Memorable means that you have to recall the hilarious in-joke you used 18 months ago to buy some novelty bday candles over the internet.
Different because everyone knows your e-mail address and if you use the same pswd everywhere your whole on-line life [me: bank, other bank, wexbus, vodafone, zoom, skype, orcid, gmail, workmail, oldworkmail, mygov, gro, qi, multitrip, wikipedia, amazon, airbnb, ryanair, ny times, dropbox, researchgate, linkedin, eflow, abe, lrb, library, caboodle, elara, eventbrite, ticketmaster] will be unzipped in Kazakhstan as you sleep.

That XKCD cartoon gave, as an illustration, a secure password made up for four different english words concatenated together - correcthorsebatterystaple - to make a technically clever uncrackable password. It should have come with a health warning because, instead of employing the same principle to generate you own combo - powergenitalia? deadsheepsavagebreast? , several dozen literalists started using, maybe with irony intended, correcthorsebatterystaple as their secure password. How do we know this? Because [delicious irony] a web-forum for xkcd fans had half a million passwords hacked and correcthorsebatterystaple came up 120 times.

On the don't do as I do but do as I say front, you might use an acronym password which has stripped off the initial letters of a familair phrase. I suggested nmtesirtd or tbontbtitq two years ago but just now I totally blanked on what they represented - so that means two secure but not memorable passwords, I guess. Auntie Google came to the rescue with the second example which means that phrase should be super-familiar [hint: Hamlet]. Google  up nmtesirtd and you should find only one hit - to the earlier Blob [hint Nightingale]. I think it's okay [because the password encryption mangles all the characters together] to have a base/core password and append suitable suffixes nmtesirtdnyt, nmtesirtdbnb etc.

An antidote to certainty

"Le doute n'est pas une condition agréable, mais la certitude est absurde".

Voltaire

Often render into English as Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is absurd. That edgily reminds me of Sex: The Pleasure Is Momentary, the Position Is Ridiculous, the Expense Is Damnable supposedly part of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son on the art of becoming a man of the world and a gentleman. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no evidence that Chesterfield ever wrote that piece of advice. Which doesn't make the sentiment any less true, though. Mais revenons nous a nos certitudes:

I was innocently watching an interview with Russian chess expert [oops can't call her Master] Алекса́ндра Константи́новна Костеню́к and youtube decided that The Next Thing I would desire to watch was a polemic by David Eagleman [in fuLL fLow] on God vs No God, and the winner is? Eagleman's position is leaning towards atheism because he cannot reconcile the certainty with which relgious people hold their personal beliefs with the extraordinary and largely unreconcilable diversity among those beliefs. If hundreds of millions of people believe that Jesus was the son of god and millions hold to the contrary, then they cannot all be right . . . but they can all be wrong. But he also gives rather short shrift to the Richard "The God Delusion" Dawkins and his equally certain strong atheism.

His talk begins with an an executive summary of the HUDF the Hubble Ultra Deep Field investigation. That required the space telescope to take 20 minutes on each of 400 consecutive orbits to point its photon detectors at the same teeny tiny fragment of sky in the constellation Fornax . . . which as far as we could tell from Earth had nothing in it. When they downloaded the data-stream and cross-referenced the pixels they had discovered 10,000 previously unknown galaxies. The Universe is really bigger than we can comprehend, so there is effectively an infinite range of possible worlds out there about which we know bugger-all. We can't even imagine the tools we'll need to make sense of it. That requires more humility and less hubris.

In full flow during an earlier interview he coined the term Possibilian to describe his well-hedged intellectual position. I call myself a Possibilian: I'm open to ideas that we don't have any way of testing right now. By the time he got back to the office he found a) his inbox was stuffed with "hey that's me, brother" b) that possibilian logic was a Googlewhack [whc prev]. The next thing he did, as you do, was purchase possibilian.com which is the place to start your uncertain journey into the unknown - bon voyage.

. . . forget the unknown unknowns [before] and the known unknowns and concentrate on all the stuff we know for sure that we don't know.

From his own field of neurology he notes that one cu.mm of brain tissue [small] has more inter-neuron connexions than there are stars in our galaxy [BIG]. I take that he's correct but even if he's out by a factor of 1000x that's kinda mind-boggling. He wants you and me to live our best lives free of dogma and full of awe and wonder. And most importantly remember, as a scientist and as a person, that it's okay to say:

I don't know

Dot Plot

A Dot Plot [example R]is: a) the antidote to Harry "Winner-takes-all" Potterism b) a simple, simply great data-visualisation tool c) something I've learned since I started in The Institute by being required to teach it. I've used it before to compare racing dogs and Indian languages; so there really is no end to its uses. The backstory here is that the whole (3-generation, 4 county, 2 country) family were at home the last w/e in August. When that happens at least one Irish Fry Up is obligatory: with rashers and eggs; tea and toast. No fried bread, more's the pity, because we're not Welsh but a choice of white pudding to compensate. Both puddings, De Roiste and Clonakilty, originated in Co. Cork. I won't regale bore you with the ingredients because Cookie sliced through the packaging to get the pudding rounds into the pan expeditiously. Some suggested doing a taste test [rating each brabdbecause we had a sample of N = 7 people with opinions. The puddings were distinctively different but nobody felt they were living their best life from the plate in front of them.

The slips of voting papers were gathered and totted up by Gdau.I who at 7+ is numerate enough to do this in her head. I can remember being her age and stymied by having to add two multi-digit numbers that were not on squared paper.  With sufficient panache for the Eurovision, she announced the result "And the winner is . . . Clonakilty".  Whoa! I said, not so fast me hearties, you cannot claim that Pudim de Clon is better than the other unless it has a significantly higher score. Give me that data.  I stomped off to my lap-top and everyone else started to talk about truly great white puddings which could be obtained in far distant locations; like Cork's Engish Market. There may be a different way of doing this but I plot each set of scores against dummy variables, here 1 or 2; and then use the scatter-plot function of ExCel. I've tweaked the duplicate scores to separate them on the graph, which appears at the top of this piece. That should make it clear that the data is all variance and no mean; or at least any difference in the average (or Total, same thing), is swamped out by the wide range of consumer preference.  Another fall out from such an analysis is that you can begin to score the people who are scoring the white pudding: Punter A is a miserable old curmudgeon who thinks both choices are crappy [where's my fried bread?]; Punter S otoh has generally a more sunny and optimistic outlook.

If you care about the distribution of data - and you should - dot-plots are just bonzer.

MRF recycling

Material Recovery Facility. The Boy worked in one of those places for a week. That story only really make sense if I share the fact that Milo is both his name and the name for a malted drink product much more popular in British colonies than in the UK itelf. Milo the powder was invented in Australia in 1934, so I guess its use spread out from there. The brand is now owned by Nestlé, the originally Swiss multinational. Without visiting a MRF, it's hard to imagine the shite that people throw in the wrong bin. If they made such visits a mandatory part of the primary school curriculum, the youngsters would develop a sense of empathy and responsibility which they could then take back home to bludgeon their heedless parents with moral outrage. Like Greta Thunberg.

That thing about "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little" may not apply to most people and their approach to their trash. I see two problems 1) not all "plastic" is the same and people can just lose the will to recycle because the rules are complex, locally variable and seemingly arbitrary. 2) The Me factor: the rules surely don't apply to me, my time is more valuable than other people's time.

Here's useful, profusely illustrated, NPR essay on the do-and-don't of recycling which concentrates on the physical, ather than chemical [list HDPE LDPE PET etc.] attributes of trash. It's worth a peek because it gives a reason for some of the rules.

• Saranwrap / clingfilm tend to wrap around the rollers of the machinery
• remove the thin plastic label from the water bottles
• crisp-packets get diverted into the paper stream
• small plastic [pen tops, bottle-caps, bread closure tags] fall through the cracks at the MRF to accumulate as a fire hazard
• plastic 'clam-shells' for salad bars, chemically identical to water bottles, are a pain in the tits in many MRFs - don't buy them!
• polystyrene is a problem because it is 95% air and needs to be de-aired / compressed before re-use. 
• Landfill is by volume - although they charge by weight because it's easier. 
• expanded polystyrene punches the economy of disposal way above its weight

Since we were told that plastics-that-cannot-be-scrumpled are only fit for landfill, I have been compressing the bags and packets into bricks. There is no point in filling the last few landfills with light-packing scrumpled plastic. Just spread out the bags and roll them up tight. And I do the best I can to get more than one use out of each bag: packing my lunch sandwich for work for example. I feel super-virtuous about this.

Phatic Haptic Part 2

This is the second - completely unconnected - part of a riff on a 6-letter anagram combo. Part 1 on Haptic Gloves and AI interfaces.  I am a bit of a fanboy for Tom Scott who has a much bigger following (on youtube) than The Blob. I've cited his work before, not least because he usually manages to get his point across in less than five minutes. At the beginning of August, Scott published a piece-to-camera about phatic expressions. These are the verbal equivalent of two primates riffling through each other's fur looking for lice and skin flakes as appetizers for a more substantial dinner. For the primates, reducing the load of ectoparasites is a positive evolutionary benefit but the primary purpose of the activity is demonstrable active care-and-attention between two relatives / allies.

I've been interested in phatic expressions for a while; especially since I noticed how much of human conversation consists solely or mainly of such content-free babble. Tom Scott cites the common greetings: How are you? ➙ How're you? ➙ How r ya? ➙ Howya ➙ Hiya. When I started work at The Institute Hiya was my standard corridor greeting for acquaintances. But it elicited "Fine thanks, and you?" too often for comfort [as if I really cared tuppence if they'd had a domestic argument over breakfast]. So I switched to G'day even if I wasn't fitted out like Crocodile Dundee.

But what really disturbed me was listening to people talking in class, in the canteen, on the wireless. An awful lot of the word-count was repeating the end of the one person's sentence and maybe adding a bit to the end as the other'scontribution. All it means is that I am listening, I heard what you had to say, you are sagacious, generous and my friend . . . I do not intend in the near future to assault you with this plate of salad . . . nor will I seek small invertebrates about your person. The trouble is that, once heard, you cannot avoid hearing this vapid prattle all the time. It's not all bad though, it shows that you can get to a +50% fluency in any foreign language; enough to win friends and influence people with maybe 200 words of formulaic clichés. In these WEA islands, you're off to a great start if you know a few weather-related phrases: Brutal . . . lashing . . . brrrr chilly . . . phew wot a scorcher . . . worst/best/wettest Summer since records began.

COHP

We live in a listicle age where some people see the need to tick ALL the boxes in some list of achievements. Think twitchers mitching off from work to hitch-hike to Achill because a rare migrant bird has been identified, sheltering from a storm in the only available bush. The rest of us rest easy with the thought "Seen one gull, seen 'em all - they all look alike", There are 50 stars [count 'em R] on Old Glory representing the 50 states: a number which has not increased since 21st August 1959 when Hawaii was inducted into the club. For 230 days, there were 49 states after Alaska joined the Union on 3rd Jan 1959 [list in order, with dates].  Now N = 50 is a respectable length for a list of Things To Do.  You could, like Dau.II in her Sporcle days, undertake to learn all the state capitals or the names of their US Senators. Going to visit every state in the Union would take a long time even with an optimised route [just shy of 11,000km from Maine to Montana for the 48 continguous states] and a fast car and/or a relay of co-drivers; add extra time for Hawaii and Alaska. XKCD mused on the problem. The 48 has been done in 94 hours, 42 minutes and 35 secs or about a lunch under four days. You could imagine doing that.

But it is a very granular achievement when you consider that there are 3,143 counties in the USA and you could undertake to visit them - if you were independently wealthy and like driving . . . and are at the bonkers end of the obsessive spectrum. Then there are the Hard Chaws who imagine getting to the highest point HP of each of those counties, at least some of which will require leaving the comfort of their automobile and getting their feet wet. There's a bunch of pointers to The County High Pointers Association on MeFi. [COHP] All that data collated from the US Geological Survey in all its obsessive detail.

And there is an equivalent confraternity called High Point Ireland. There are only 32 counties, and Mt Leinster [L Up Rathanna's Cwm, MtL viewed from the SW] is highest point for both Counties Carlow and Wexford, so I've bagged a twofer already. No hurry to knock off the rest.

Woo Haa Sep Tem Baa

I have to go back to work tomorrow. Like I have to physically turn up outside HR and sign next to my name to indicate that I'm not still in Bali. This may change the Blob's emphasis or cause it to stop abruptly if the canteen is subject to a coliform terrorist outrage.

• I was slightly critical "Pardonu Leyzer , bela provo, sed neniu cigaron" of Esperanto on Zamenhof Day in 2013. Jaysus, I didn't take any prisoners in those days. I've just been pointed at Jan Misali's ConLang Critic channel; and inevitably he has a go at Esperanto. You don't have to understand the linguistic jargon: alveolar fricative etc. to love the gallop of it.
• People who know their stuff II: Dan Hurd panning gold on the Fraser River
• prospector's jargon by size nugget > nuggy > picker > flake > speck > flour
• reminder: 1g Au is worth $50
• Utsushi: what to do with that gold (and copper silver and lead).
• If you or your children are illiterate, it might be the way they teach reading. 
• Алекса́ндра Константи́новна Костеню́к reflects on chess, gender and politics
• Gortex works but costs an arm and a gel. Frogg Toggs are dead cheap but works pretty good.
• Ivy League Endowments exposed.
• US Universities? what happens when Two Patriarchs clash horns. example of the Streisand Effect
• I'm reading Gut by Giulia Enders. I'll have more to say later. Here's a preview.
• Propaganda for the EU. 1 minute. I believe.
• 19 Jul 1989 United Airlines 232 lost all their hydraulics in flight. Captain Al Haynes, with help, flew the uncontrollable aircraft and crash-landed at Sioux City, saving more than half the passengers' lives. Al "Right Stuff" Haynes (87) has gone to meet the Great Aviator of the Sky.
• Ashokan Farewell by Jay Unger and others