Comments from a mutant slime-snake-monkey-person.
Barry Leiba
New York, United States
My work-related web page: http://internetmessagingtechnology.org
(Please see the note at the bottom of this page.)
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Here’s the text of a recent spam comment to an old blog post:
I inclination not concur on it. I over nice post. Especially the title-deed attracted me to read the sound story.I rejected the comment, of course, but the text was too... um... interesting to let go entirely.
Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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Last weekend, I hopped down to Florida to visit family. At the instigation of a friend, we visited the Wakodahatchee Wetlands, an artificial wetland in Delray Beach in southern Palm Beach County, set up by the water management district.
It’s an “artificial wetland”, in that the ponds were dug and the water is pumped in as part of the water treatment process. From the web site:
Every day, the Palm Beach County Water Utilities Department’s Southern Region Water Reclaimation [sic] Facility pumps approximately two million gallons of highly treated water into the Wakodahatchee Wetlands. By acting as a natural filter for the nutrients that remain, the wetlands work to further clense [sic] the water.
As they built Wakodahatchee, a name they say comes from Seminole words meaning “created waters”, they set up different areas with different characteristics, appealing to different species of wildlife. The result is sections where one finds herons, sections with alligators, sections with ducks and moorhens, and so on.
And as with many of these sorts of places, you can breeze through and see plenty of birds, but if you take your time, the variety is fascinating.
A small selection of my photos from the visit are in a Picasa album, with each animal identified. I think my favourite is this Great Blue Heron who struck a nice profile pose for us.
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Last week, the New York Times came out with yet another article about how people consistently pick bad passwords. It’s a hackneyed subject by now, but I shouldn’t complain: I cover this sort of old ground repeatedly, myself. But what makes this article remarkable — or, at least, what makes me want to remark on it — is their attempt to explain why.
One technologist tries to explain it as an innate aspect of people:
“I guess it’s just a genetic flaw in humans,” said Amichai Shulman, the chief technology officer at Imperva, which makes software for blocking hackers. “We’ve been following the same patterns since the 1990s.”
Right, and perhaps we evolved that gene in, what, 1992? No, this is not like a fight-or-flight response, not like colour blindness, and not at all like a dislike for Brussels sprouts.[1] I suppose that if by “genetic flaw” he means that we’re very bad at figuring out how to defend ourselves, he’s wrong, but if he means that we have a strong tendency toward habitual behaviour, he’s right about that. But this is a red herring.
The more interesting point, which seems to be made every time this question comes up, is the “information overload” reason:
Security experts suggest that we are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we have to remember in this digital age.
“Nowadays, we have to keep probably 10 times as many passwords in our head as we did 10 years ago,” said Jeff Moss, who founded a popular hacking conference and is now on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “Voice mail passwords, A.T.M. PINs and Internet passwords — it’s so hard to keep track of.”
That certainly is the conventional wisdom, but just look two paragraphs earlier, and you’ll find this:
Overusing simple passwords is not a new phenomenon. A similar survey examined computer passwords used in the mid-1990s and found that the most popular ones at that time were “12345,” “abc123” and “password.”
The mid-1990s — fifteen years ago, which is more than the “10 years ago” quoted from Mr Moss. And we can go back another ten years, too. In 1985, I did a password audit on the mainframe system that I managed at the time, and found that the most common passwords were... [Can you guess?]... “password”, “logon”, “cpread” (“CP READ” appeared in the lower right corner of the screen when you had to log on), and other such things. Others used the models of their cars, their favourite sports teams, and the like.[2]
And here’s the point: at that time, this single password was the only one they had to remember (well, and maybe their ATM PINs, but not everyone used ATMs then). There was no overload, and we told them not to use crappy passwords, but... they used crappy passwords.
So the “too many to remember” reason is bogus. We do have too many passwords to remember (or would, if we used different ones for everything), but that’s independent of the fact that we pick bad ones.
I think we’re used to having multiple levels of security, we’re used to trusting most of the people around us, and we’re used to assuming that there are enough targets that “they” are not likely to pick us. The door locks we use aren’t terribly effective, but that’s OK: there are neighbours keeping an eye out, there are police patrolling, there aren’t very many burglars around, and there are many, many houses for those few to choose from.
And we don’t really understand that online, it’s not like that. There are no neighbours and no real police (the web site management are reactive, not protective). The “burglars” are all over the world, and not limited to the few who live near you. They can work completely undetected, and your password is all you have.
Even if we did the bad thing and used the same password for everything, but we made it a really good password, we’d be better off. That we don’t do it isn’t because we can’t remember one or two good passwords. It’s because no matter how often we’re told about this, we just don’t really get it.
[1] Actually, I love them, especially roasted with garlic.
[2] There were two users who particularly amused me with their choices of passwords. We looked not just at current passwords, but at the last six — the extent to which we saved the old passwords — and so we could look at patterns. One user had a pattern of passwords like “lovegod”, “helives”, and “yesjesus”. Another’s had ones like “shitcrap”, “asshole”, and “dumbfuck”. Yes, it takes all kinds to make a world.
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Speaking of spam: I am turning off the ability to comment anonymously. I’m getting tired of rejecting spam comments, which I’m getting at a rate of ten to twenty a day. Almost all of the spam comments are anonymous, and almost all of the anonymous comments are spam.
Those few of you who don’t want to identify yourselves in any real way can still create a Google or OpenID account using a pseudonym, and you can even change your pseudonym from time to time, if you like. But you'll have to log in, and the “anonymous” choice won’t be there any more.
I’m sorry to have to do this, but, well, blame the spammers.
According to the lede in a New Scientist article from Monday:
Spammers’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer scientists claims.
The team turned one of their computers into a zombie, but, well, not quite: they were still in control of it, even while it was part of its botnet. And while it followed the orders of the botnet controller, the researchers recorded and analyzed what was going on.
In particular, they looked at the variations in the messages, and used that to form a profile of the spam the botnet was generating:
After analysing 1000 emails generated by this compromised machine — less than 10 minutes’ work for most bots — the researchers were able to reverse-engineer the template. Knowledge of that template then enabled filters to block further spam from that bot with 100 per cent accuracy.
High accuracy can be achieved by existing spam filters, but sometimes at the cost of blocking legitimate mail. The new system did not produce a single false positive when tested against more than a million genuine messages, says Andreas Pitsillidis, one of the team: “The biggest advantage is this false positive rate.”
How useful is this?
Not very. It’s interesting as a case study — and I’d like to see the paper that came out of this work. But it has little practical value. First, as Michael O’Reirdan points out in the article, even if we can stop a spam run one minute in, much less ten, the botnet would have sent out millions of messages already.
Second, for this to be of more than passing interest, we’d have to make sure the people using it had machines on every spam botnet out there, or at least most of them.
Third, smart botnet software can get around this mechanism by changing its template every couple of minutes, and can even learn to detect the spy machine and isolate it from the botnet. In the worst case, it might even be able to feed the spy bad information that could result in the blocking of legitimate mail — just the opposite of the zero false-positive rate the researchers are so happy with.
Finally, it’s not really a surprising result, that infiltrating a botnet allows us to figure out how it works and to temporarily interfere with its operation. But botnet software changes rapidly, and we have to keep learning as it changes.
I like the idea of using this to investigate and experiment with botnets. But let’s keep our expectations realistic. This, as everything else that anyone’s proposed, is not the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem.
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From the instruction manual for a telephone with a built-in answering system:
You can turn the answering system off, but if you do so, the answering system does not answer calls and record incoming messages.
Right.
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I noted this, in my recent post about credit-card fraud:
[...] and the bank will just write off the $1000 loss as a cost of doing business. It’s small change, compared with what some crooks get away with.
Why don’t the banks do something about this?
Well, they do. They block transactions, freeze accounts, and the like. They have their equivalent to email anti-spam software: fraud-detection software that looks at every transaction and decides when things are suspicious — and when they’re sufficiently suspicious that it warrants an immediate freeze on the account.
And, as with anti-spam software, the banks’ fraud-detection software runs into false positives. Many, many false positives. The way the banks control their losses is by setting their fraud detection to be very sensitive, and not worrying about false positives — essentially, not worrying about them at all.
I find it interesting that this is a customer inconvenience that they’re willing to inflict, because banks are generally terrified of useful security mechanisms that would cause change and inconvenience for their customers. Banks would much rather eat the fraud losses than make inconvenient changes, even when those changes would be truly effective and would be something people would soon get used to.
That’s why they’ve been introducing feel-good “security” that adds little real value — things such as login images and arrays of “security questions” (which, as I’ve said before, most often make things worse) — and will never adopt something like two-way SSL/TLS authentication, which actually does.
Two-way authentication could make a good step toward stopping phishing, by making the knowledge of a user’s account number and password insufficient to break into the account. Credentials would be stored on the user’s computer (and/or cell phone or other device), and those credentials would be used to validate a secure connection to the bank, using asymmetric cryptography techniques. The “password” that the user enters would only allow use of the credentials on the device, but neither the password nor the credentials would themselves be sent over the network. An attacker would need to steal both the password and the device in order to be able to log in.
But it would require the user to install something — at least the security credentials, and perhaps also some software, depending upon the implementation — on every device that could log into the bank. And the user could no longer access her bank account from someone else’s computer (nor, for example, from an Internet cafe, but users shouldn’t be doing that anyway).
And that’s where things become inconvenient at a level the bank isn’t willing to deal with. It’s one thing to tell a customer to call the customer service line and confirm a transaction. It’s another to expect the customer to install security certificates or software, and it’s still another to limit where she can log in from — and to no longer be able to say that you provide online access from anywhere.
There’s a similar situation with U.S. banks’ reluctance to distribute credit cards equipped with smart chips — which, as Nathaniel points out in the comments, doesn’t stop bogus “card not present” transactions, but which does address the issue of skimming, what most likely happened to me. This reluctance mystifies me, as it seems the inconvenience to the customer in this case is limited to receiving a new card to replace the old one, and having to remember and use a PIN. Users in Europe and Asia seem to have had no problem switching.
Meanwhile, estimates put the collective cost of credit card fraud in the billions of dollars.
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Today begins the fifth year of these pages.
Four years ago today, I started this with a call to be outraged at what was happening and to do something about it. Now, four years and just about 1600 posts later, much has changed... yet we’re still at war, the economy is chaotic, congress is flailing about, and there are all sorts of socio-political woes. Whatever your views, whether you lean left or right, or stand straight in the middle, there are still things to be outraged about.
And you can still do something about it, in whatever small way. Write to your legislators. Write to the public, through a blog of your own. Give money or time to causes you believe in. Participate in protests; go out into the streets and make yourself heard. Tell them that you’re as mad as hell, and you’re not going to take this any more.
And thanks for coming here, reading what I have to say, and adding your thoughts in the comments. It means a lot to me to know that there are quite a few folks out there reading these pages. It makes me believe that I am doing my small part.
On to year five!
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Singer/songwriter Warren Zevon was born on this day in 1947.
Well, I’m sitting here playing solitaire
With my pearl-handled deck
The county won’t give me no more methadone
And they cut off your welfare checkCarmelita, hold me tighter
I think I’m sinking down
And I’m all strung out on heroin
On the outskirts of town— “Carmelita” (1974)
I first knew Warren Zevon’s music from Linda Ronstadt’s covers: she sang four songs that he included on his 1976 album (“Hasten Down the Wind”, “Mohammed’s Radio”, “Carmelita”, and “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”), an album I didn’t know until Excitable Boy came out in 1978. My cousin played both albums for me, and I was immediately smitten by the poetry, the socio-political commentary, the offbeat subject matter that sometimes went to the macabre (as in the title song of the 1978 album), and Zevon’s voice, which seemed perfect for his material.
I’ve always liked those two albums the best, and I’m not sure whether it’s because they were my introduction to his music. When he released Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School, I saw him perform at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium. It was a great concert, and somewhere I have a bunch of slides that I took with my camera. One day, I’ll find someone with a slide scanner and I’ll digitize them.
She’s so many women
He can’t find the one who was his friend
So he’s hanging on to half a heart
He can’t have the restless part
So he tells her to hasten down the wind— “Hasten Down the Wind” (1975)
Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School had some good songs, as did his next studio album, The Envoy, but neither did as well as the others... and then he took a nose-dive, fired by his record label and descending into alcoholism and drug abuse. He eventually kicked the problems and came back with Sentimental Hygiene and a series of subsequent records, but I’ve just stuck with what he did on Asylum Records, and that’s how I’ll always remember his music.
Warren Zevon, who titled a song from his 1976 album “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead”, went to sleep on the 7th of September, 2003, at the age of only 56.
I was gambling in Havana
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money
Dad, get me out of thisI’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between a rock and a hard place
And I’m down on my luck— “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” (1977)
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How’s this for a horrid CAPTCHA?:
I haven’t seen one where the contrast was that low before. Low contrast is hard on aging eyes; thank &deity for the “zoom” feature on the MacBook.
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Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-to-4 decision with significant consequences for elections in this country. Reversing several prior courts’ decisions, they declared unconstitutional the restrictions on campaign donations from corporations and labour unions.
There are valid arguments on both sides of this decision. Unfortunately, the main point taken by the majority is not one of them. The court has long and inexplicably supported the idea that money equates to speech — specifically, that donating money is a first-amendment right, amounting to free speech. That there was any intent toward that by the authors of the constitution is just silly. Freedom of speech was meant to protect people who would speak out, disseminate ideas, whether popular or not. It was never meant to allow the bankrolling of political candidates.
But even more ludicrous, on its very face, is the idea that corporations should have the same first-amendment rights as individuals. Yet Justice Kennedy, in the majority decision, says just that: “The court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations.”
Of course, the argument against that is the undue control that corporations can exert. With the enormous financial resources wielded by a large company, it can buy the loyalty of a candidate with donations, and intimidate legislators by toppling their colleagues who vote against the company’s interests.
This isn’t an idle fear: there are many ways for this to happen now. Allowing open financial support on a large scale just makes it much, much worse. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has just given the green light.
Yet the standard conservative argument for opening this up is also valid: by limiting contributions, we limit the ability for opposition candidates to raise funds with which to run campaigns. If we broaden the fundraising opportunities, we broaden the potential candidate pool. We make it possible for the average citizen to run for office.
Yet we don’t want the “average citizen” to wind up running with corporate interests on her back.
There is another answer. To even the chances for the average citizen, we can make sure she can come by the millions necessary to run for office. Or we can make sure that millions are not necessary.
Instead of campaign finance limits, we need campaign spending limits. The amount of money — and time — spent on political campaigns in this country is insane. Strict limits on both will save a lot of ridiculous waste, while putting elected office within reach of every citizen with the interest in serving.
And then the voters could decide, as our founders intended.
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Perhaps you’ve heard that the Democrat who ran a bad campaign to finish out the late Senator Kennedy’s term lost to the Republican who ran a better campaign. Perhaps you’ve also heard the knells telling us that this signifies the end of the world as we know it. To hear it from some, all opportunity for getting anything done in the Senate is over.
At the very least, it’s common knowledge that health-care reform is in trouble. The New York Times tells us in its headline that “Democrats Regroup on Health After Losing Seat”, and the headline that article had on the RSS feed was more dire: “Democratic Defeat Imperils Health Care Overhaul”.
So, wait, let’s take a step back and look at it again.
First, the “filibuster-proof majority” was a myth to start with. The Democrats relied on “Independent” Joe Lieberman for that, and it’s been clear for some time that he is not on their side. Far from assuring the power to push legislation through, that just enabled Senator Lieberman to muscle things around, at the expense of the Democratic Party.
Second, a filibuster-proof majority is a fragile thing that’s of questionable value. With some exceptions, if an issue is touchy enough that they have to worry about a filibuster, making sure that all the Democrats are signed up to break it requires so much waffling on the substance of the bill, so much damaging compromise and dilution that what they wind up getting through has little left. Indeed, that’s what’s happened with the health-insurance reform bill (it’s about health insurance, not health care), already making it so thin that it looks like a homeopathic remedy.
These are where attempts to be “bipartisan” go: trying to please everyone means that in the end, we please no one, really.
The effect that the seating of Scott Brown as the new junior senator from Massachusetts will have is not that anything will be derailed, not that all negotiations will break down, and not that the health insurance bill — which Senator Brown has promised to vote against — will founder, but that those with a vision of reforming health insurance may have to make some changes to get it through.
This can actually be their opportunity to make positive changes, as they recognize that they no longer need to coddle the fringe elements who recognized where the situation put them and threatened to kick sand in their faces.
They can now come back with something that will make 52% of the Senate more happy, rather than settling for one that 59% can tolerate.
And if a filibuster comes, then let it. Senator Reid can say, “OK, if you want to talk, talk. We have time. The Senate is now in session 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until we sort this out. Have at it.” And it will last until enough voters in some of the less conservative places (such as Massachusetts) put pressure on their senators to stop getting in the way and go back to getting things done.
A filibuster on this bill will delay things for a short time. But in the end, I’d rather have a better law that took a few extra weeks than some junk that’s of little long-term value,[1] but that allowed our politicians to say “Mission accomplished.”
Sadly, I have no confidence in the Senate Democrats to make this happen.
[1] That’s not to say that I think the proposed legislation is useless; it clearly has some useful points to it. It will help some people a lot, and everyone a little. It’s just that it’s had some very important points cut out of it, and the problem is that it still doesn’t accomplish what we need: health care for all Americans. Just cover everyone.
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In a recent post, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is another option for content delivery (besides cable/fiber and satellite): one can get the content online, through a service such as Hulu or Apple TV.
For now, not everything is available through these services, and the limitations on available content might deter some potential users. On the other hand, for people who’re specifically looking in this direction because they don’t want the overblown content circus, getting what’s available online might be just the thing. And you don’t just have to watch it on your computer: there are setups to put it — in 1080p HD — on your television set.
To make this work, we’re really depending upon network neutrality. Because one is receiving television content over the Internet, using the same service provider that would like to provide television content through their own dedicated service at additional cost, it seems clear that the service provider has an incentive to make the experience less than ideal. If service providers are permitted to block, slow down, or otherwise interfere with this kind of Internet usage, they can steer customers away from it, and back to the provider’s television service.
When I was on the Internet Architecture Board, I began setting up a technical plenary session about net neutrality for the Stockholm IETF meeting. IAB member Marcelo Bagnulo took it over when I left the IAB, and he moderated the session. You can see the result as a transcript (search for “4. Network Neutrality”), with the slides here and here (PDFs).
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Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle died yesterday of liver cancer, at age 63.
Love is a shiny car
Love is a steel guitar
Love is a battle scar
Love is a morning starLove is a twelve-bar blues
Love is your blue-suede shoes
Love is a heart abused
Love is a mind confusedLove is the pleasures untold
And for some, love is still a band of gold
My love has no reason, has no rhyme
My love crossed the double lineLove is a minor chord
Love is a mental ward
Love is a drawn sword
Love is its own rewardLove is the pleasures untold
And for some, love is still a band of gold
My love has no reason, has no rhyme
My love crossed the double line— “Love Is”, by Anna, Jane, and Kate McGarrigle
I recently made a hotel reservation for an upcoming business trip. Here’s what the hotel’s confirmation email said:
Welcome Barry,
Renewal awaits. We’ve received your reservation. Thank you for choosing to experience The [hotel name]. Your mind, body, and spirit will be energized. If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more rewarding, please ask.
Be Well,
[hotel name]
Oy.
Update, 9:30: It’s been pointed out to me that a quick Google search will reveal the hotel chain to be Westin, so there’s no point in hiding it.
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The Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project has given us a Martin Luther King Day gift: a report on their new survey on racial attitudes a year after President Obama’s election (full report (PDF) here).
Not surprisingly, the number of African Americans who think that they are, as a group, better off now than they were five years ago has about doubled since 2007, from 20% to 39%. And more than ¾ think that blacks and whites get along well.
It’s clear that perspective is a significant thing. When asked, “Has the country done enough to give blacks equal rights with whites,” 54% of whites and 42% of Hispanics said yes, “The country has made the necessary changes,” while only 13% of blacks responded that way. That doesn’t surprise me either: it’s easy for whites to see some bit of progress, as we’ve had many of over the years, and to say, “That’s made it better,” while those at the receiving end of the discrimination still see the problems, and what has yet to be done. Even the election of an African American president doesn’t automatically fix everything.
The part I find the most interesting is the section on interracial marriage. It seems, there, that blacks are, as a group, more accepting of familial diversity than whites and Hispanics are. See the graphic to the right (click to enlarge). What it says is that about 80% of blacks say they’d “be fine with” a family member’s marrying someone of another race, whether that person be white, Hispanic, or Asian... it doesn’t seem to matter which. In contrast, Hispanics and whites are more apprehensive about adding a new African American family member than they are about the other ethnic groups, and only 64% of whites say they’d “be fine with” a black in-law.
I find the difference curious. It seems to dispel a myth — one that exists among whites, at least — that about the same proportion of blacks dislike whites as the other way around. That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case, at least when folks are made to say that they wouldn’t want their daughter to marry one.
Finally, in both 2007 and 2009, significantly fewer blacks have put the blame for difficulty “getting ahead” on discrimination. On this question:
Which of these statements comes closer to your own views—even if neither is exactly right?
A. Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.
B. Blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.
...52% of blacks (and about 70% of whites and Hispanics) chose B, and 34% chose A. The answer by whites fairly well tracks the numbers who think that discrimination is no longer a problem, but that’s not true of the statistics from blacks. That seems to say that blacks think there’s more that they, themselves can do to address or to overcome discrimination.
There’s lots more interesting stuff in the full report and in the data from the questionnaire. Far fewer blacks than whites trust the police, for instance. And about 10% of us have no friends of a different race than ourselves.
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In a Science News article about “waltzing black holes”, the headline writer decided to get too cute, with, “Plenty of black holes do-si-do”. Ha ha. Only, that’s a mixed metaphor, dance-wise: do-si-do is not a waltz move. Don’t these people know anything?
Pointers to the sparse list of this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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...and what does your doctor call you?
Last month,[1] Anne Marie Valinoti, a physician in New Jersey, opined about that subject in the New York Times. Dr Valinoti is generally called that — “Doctor Valinoti” — though there are some patients, generally ones much older than she, who call her by her first name. In the other direction, she claims consistency:
Regardless of whether I am “Anne Marie” or “Dr. Valinoti” to a patient, I rarely call a patient by his or her first name. As a rule, patients who are my senior are always “Mr./Ms./Dr.” Patients I meet for the first time are always addressed by their title, even teenagers (it seems silly, I know).
It doesn’t seem silly to me, because there’s more than an age or class difference conveyed by the sort of formality that dictates the “Dr Valinoti” and “Mr Smith” pairing. There’s a clarity of roles and the creation of a mutual respect between the patient and the physician, which I think are important aspects of the relationship.
It seems more natural for “Doctor” to do the poking and prodding that’s sometimes necessary, than for it to be “Anne Marie” or “Andrew”, and my saying “Doctor” reminds us both of the professional aspect. And it may facilitate the giving — and receiving — of difficult news for me to be “Mr Leiba”, and not “Barry”.
There’s also the linguistic side of this: other languages have separate second-person references for formal and familiar address. “Usted” vs “tú” in Spanish, “vous” vs “tu” in French, “Sie” vs “du” in German... these allow speakers of those languages to maintain formality in normal speech, just by how they say “you”. In English, we’ve lost the formal forms of address, leaving us to rely on titles (or the often stilted “sir” and “ma’am”) to maintain a separation from the too-familiar.
Of course, each patient will have her own sense of this, and doctors should defer to patients’ wishes on the matter. If a patient feels more comfortable being on a first-name basis, the physician should accept that. In no case would, “That’s Doctor Veeblefester to you!” be appropriate. (If it’s a child stepping over the line, it should be a parent who addresses that, not the doctor.)
Q: What do you call the guy who graduated last in his class at medical school?
A: “Doctor.”
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For a while, now, I’ve been posting my technology-related items over at Scientific Blogging. To start off 2010, Hank, who runs the site, invited us to join a new “Hot Topics” feature, which will periodically focus the bloggers on a particular topic. The first Hot Topic is this:
The Upcoming Decade in Science
What will the new decade bring in the world of science? What will happen by 2020 in your field?
Making predictions is always a dicey thing, and perhaps most so in the field of computer science. The good thing about knowing that is that one can pretty much “wing it”. If one gets it right, it’s cool. If not, well, no one really expected one to.
So let’s put on some wings, and see whither we fly.
A decade from now, most of us won’t be “using the computer,” in the sense that we do now. That is, there’ll be few desktop machines, few people will think about going to the computer, and there won’t be a sense of logging on, or “getting on the Internet.” Instead, computers will be part of everything we use, and the Internet will just be there for us.
We’ve been making a start on that over the last few years, with smartphones, culminating in the iPhone and its imitators. It snags a network where it can, be it cellular or WiFi, and the user can do what she wants with the Internet. My BlackBerry, in addition to acting as a telephone and keeping my address book, has my calendar, to-do list, note pad (text and voice), and email. It’s also a web browser, a GPS device, a music and video player, and a camera (albeit not a good one). It has applications for all the instant-messaging systems I use, and there are also Twitter and Facebook apps for it. It’s an alarm clock and a calculator. It, as we’d have said in earlier days of computing, does everything but eat.
We’re moving more in that direction with netbooks and, taking the stage at the recent Consumer Electronics Show, smartbooks, lightweight laptop computers that are optimized for Internet operation. Taking advantage of cloud computing, these devices, even more than the smartphones, assume that the Internet is always there. They get their applications and services from the Internet, and they store their data there.
But these are still Internet-specific devices that we pull out and explicitly use. They represent the first half of the decade.
Still in the research stage is the Internet of things, the concept that everything around us is part of the Internet, and it’s all connected. The full-blown Internet of things includes appliances and other “things” that are obviously devices — your television, stereo system, alarm clock, coffee maker, and car will be part of the Internet of things. But it also includes things you wouldn’t expect, things that are not “devices” in any sense we’ve thought of before. Individual items, such as books and magazines, articles of clothing, and cans of soup may eventually be “connected,” in the sense that they’ll be addressable objects that the active parts of the Internet can interact with.
Ten years ago, when IBM Research started moving toward this sort of idea, I posed the following scenario:
You’re invited to an early-morning meeting at your company’s main office next Tuesday. You accept the invitation, and it’s added to your calendar.
When Monday evening comes, you’re watching TV, and just before your favourite program starts (on demand, of course), your TV — which is on the network and is tied into your calendar — reminds you of tomorrow morning’s change from your routine. When you go to bed, your alarm clock (also online) gives you a final reminder, and offers to set an earlier wake-up alarm. You allow it to do so.
You’re awakened an hour early on Tuesday morning, and your coffee maker (it’s online as well, and has a hopper of beans and a water supply) makes your coffee correspondingly early. When you get to your (online) car, the GPS is already set to direct you where you need to go, routing you by the cheap gas station and avoiding a traffic accident that’s blocking one of the main routes.
When you get in the car to drive home, you see a message queued by your refrigerator telling you that you’re almost out of milk. You’re also given electronic coupons for weekly discounts on salmon and chicken, and there’s a message from your husband suggesting pork for dinner (well, not everything can come together perfectly). The heating system in your house, which turned itself down when everyone left for the day, switches back to “occupied” mode to be ready for your arrival — not on a timer, but because it actually has an estimate for when you’ll be home.
Your husband is picking up the kids, and the system has an estimate for when they’ll be home, too. It’s displayed on the “family status” touch screen built into the refrigerator door, which also reminds you that your mother will be stopping by around 8:30. The coffee maker will be ready.
Now, one can debate the usefulness of various pieces of that scenario, substitute delivery for stopping at the store, and so on. But the main point is that all these interconnected things, from the coffee maker, to the refrigerator, to the milk jug, serve to make your day easier, and to make it less likely that you’ll forget something you meant to do. And it’s all still under your control: you don’t have to allow the alarm to re-set itself; you needn’t follow the route the GPS suggests; you might decide not to stop at the store. It’s assisting you, not controlling you.
Events that are of interest to you could show up on the refrigerator screen, and a touch of the screen could order tickets. Another touch of the screen could sent a message to Mom asking her to come at 8 instead of 8:30... or could initiate a voice call on the hands-free system in the kitchen, while you prepare the salmon. When you’re watching television, the program could automatically pause when a call comes in or when you go into the other room for a moment.
This all would have sounded like science fiction not too long ago, but it’s well within our reach in the next ten years.
Of course, it comes with enormous security and privacy issues attached to it. The more connected we are, the more vulnerable we are to electronic break-ins, scams and other trickery, and our own errors. And even within the family, we need privacy and access controls: you don’t want to be alerted that someone’s coming home with a surprise gift, and the kids can’t be buying tickets to every concert in town. Our ability to get the security and privacy right will be what determines how much of this we actually do by 2020.
So there we are: home computing in 2020. We’ll have to wait ten years to see how well I’ve predicted. But what do you think? Is this plausible? Desirable? Where do you think computing will be in ten years’ time?
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Every year at this time, I get my town’s Winter/Spring recreation schedule, an 8½×11 booklet of some 50 or 60 pages, and the recycling and solid waste brochure, a 5½×8½ booklet of around 10 pages. They arrive in the mail within a week or two of each other.
Last weekend, the post brought, for the first time, a combined recreation schedule and recycling/solid waste brochure, in one mailing. It’s 8½×11, with the recreation schedule on white paper, and with the waste info on green pages inserted between pages 30 and 31 of the other, meant to be “pulled out”.
I suspect that combining the mailings saved the town a great deal in mailing costs, and probably in printing costs as well. I do hope that whoever thought of it got appropriate kudos (a nice pay raise, or at least a good bonus), and I have written the town and said that. It probably took some effort to convince the sanitation department to give up having their own booklet sent out (and I hope it won’t result in some residents’ throwing away the recreation department’s schedule, unaware that the other bit is bundled within).
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On the last day of 2009, I picked up something in a store, proffering my credit card for payment. After a moment with the machine, the cashier said, “It’s declined.”
Huh? I’d used it the day before, and there’s no reason anything should have happened since then. She tried again, with the same result.
When I got home, I logged into the account online, and there was a message for me to call the fraud department, which I did. The very pleasant and personable service representative checked for me and saw the transaction I’d just attempted. “It was also declined yesterday,” he said, “when you tried to buy gas in Freeport. But it worked when you used it at WalMart.” Ah.
No, I told him, I hadn’t been to Freeport (maybe an hour and a half from here, on Long Island), yesterday nor any other day. And I hadn’t been to WalMart recently, either.
He closed my account and opened a new one, and said that, unfortunately, it would be longer than usual before I got a replacement card, because of the new year holiday. It was Thursday, but the new card wouldn’t be mailed until Monday.
When I checked the account online again on Tuesday, I found six charges — including the one at WalMart — that were fraudulent, all at stores in Massapequa, near Freeport. The charges had been made with a card (the service rep had surmised that “they” had made a bogus card with my account number on it), and were all between $100 and $200, presumably large enough to be worthwhile, but small enough not to immediately arouse suspicion. I have no idea how the bank caught it between those six purchases and the gas station, but they did.
The new card would, I was told, come with an affidavit sheet, on which I could list any fraudulent transactions that appear on my account, and the bank would take care of it. And, indeed, this won’t cost me anything except the inconvenience of chancing my account number (making sure that automatic purchases are changed over, and so on), and the bank will just write off the $1000 loss as a cost of doing business. It’s small change, compared with what some crooks get away with.
And, yet, it leaves me angry. The people who did it will never be caught, and they’ve just gotten away with stealing almost $1000 worth of goods. The fact that they used my account number to do that makes it sit very close to home. There wasn’t any way I could have prevented it — the account number could have been recorded a couple of days earlier, or perhaps it was months ago, and was only now being used.
There’s huge money in stolen credit-card account numbers. Most are collected and used electronically, worldwide. This is a smaller-scale operation, done locally and using real, physical cards.
It’s just irritating to be reminded how many people are out there who are prepared to steal whatever they can get their hands on.
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What do you think?: should I get one of these when they’re available?
I’d been thinking about getting a small travel computer, even before I had the outage on my laptop. Now, afterward, the additional point of having a backup machine makes it all the more desirable. And the Lenovo Skylight’s $500 price is in the right range.
On the positive side:
On the negative side:
I think that last point will be the deciding factor. If I can do some basic work while I’m offline, and I can plug in some USB devices — disk drives and other memory devices, printers, scanners — then it’s appealing. If not, if it’s just a big, expensive iPod when it’s off the Internet, then I’ll give it a miss.
But it sure looks cool!
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As 2009 came to a close, Time Warner Cable narrowly averted the removal of Fox channels (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) from its channel lineup, and Cablevision failed to do the same for Scripps Networks’ Food Network and HGTV channels. The issue, of course, is money: the content providers want to raise the fees for their channels, and the service providers want to avoid passing on yet another round of higher fees to their subscribers. (See also here, and here.)
These sorts of disputes amount to a form of extortion, where the consumer winds up as the victim. We could say that it’s a free market, and we should let free-market economics decide the matter, but that would be ignoring the monopoly situations that exist here. Whether you like Fox News or not, it’s clear that it’s a unique service, and that lovers of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and their ilk can find that programming from no other source. The Fox channels also carry popular programs such as The Simpsons and American Idol. Similarly, if one wants to watch Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Emeril, one finds them on The Food Network... or not.
The content providers know that, and use the power they get from the popularity of their programming to make demands of the service providers, knowing they have them over a barrel, but the service providers are not innocent either. There’s little choice of service providers even in large markets, and no choice at all in the smaller markets. Where I live, I choose between Cablevision and Verizon... or I can switch to satellite, which is not an appealing option.
The result is that the service providers can charge pretty much what they want to, and can set up their packages as they please... and we, the consumers, are stuck with what they offer, or nothing.
And what they offer is designed to have us pay dearly for what we don’t want, in order to get what we do. A few years ago, the New York Yankees demanded that Cablevision carry their YES channels on the basic cable service, ostensibly “making them available to all subscribers,” rather than having only subscribers who wanted those channels pay the extra fee. The Yankees won, and the result was that all subscribers had to pay $2 more per month, whether we wanted the YES channels or not (I do not).
The same is true with many of the other price hikes that go on: ESPN, Fox, the Scripps channels... increased rates on these force rates up for all subscribers, because we don’t have the option to choose to take one, but not the others. And that is dictated by the service providers (and by the contracts that they agree to for the content). The content providers feel they have to hike up their charges to make up for lost advertising revenue, which has been on the wane for a while.
I can’t tell you how many channels I get on my Cablevision system now — the number has gone up from “a bunch”, to “a boatload”, to “more than one can imagine”, over time. But I can tell you how many I ever watch: sixteen. There are eight I use regularly, and eight more occasionally. And that’s it. I am paying for Fox, for sports (at least a dozen sports channels, and maybe more), for children’s programming, for old sitcoms, for music videos, and for the credulous garbage aired by “Discovery” and its sisters, all without wanting to.
And it’s no small amount. When I first got cable TV, I paid $30 a month for it, and even that seemed like a lot when I compared it to getting free TV over the airwaves, paid for by advertising. I’m now paying over $80 a month, when you add everything up — the basic fee, the rental on the cable box, the rental on the remote control for the cable box, the taxes and extra charges, and so on — and the next price hike comes at the whim of Scripps (or Fox, or ESPN, or the New York Yankees).
Scripps, of course, for its part, says that they’re not being paid what their content is worth, and they have to take a stand and demand proper compensation for it. It’s hard to argue with that, particularly since the subscribers (the customers, us) can’t weigh in, at least not in a meaningful way. Not with our wallets.
Here’s where regulation needs to step in... but not to force accommodation one way or another, as the courts did with the YES situation. The service providers should be required to offer channel selections à la carte. Subscribers should be able to pay for exactly the channels we want, and not to pay for those we don’t want. The service providers may certainly offer discounted packages for channel groupings, as they do today. But unlike today, customers should have a choice, channel by channel.
And then if Scripps wants to make Cablevision customers pay a few dollars per month more, we will have the option of saying “No,” by simply dropping those channels from our subscriptions, no longer forced to keep them in order to be able to watch PBS and CNN.
There are dire warnings going around that setting up channel selection that way will kill all the small channels, aimed a specific markets — that channels such as BET and Lifetime will disappear because not enough households will pay for them, when they have to pay directly. I don’t agree with that assessment, and neither does Consumers Union, which has been pushing for this for years.
À la carte pricing won’t happen unless we demand it, loudly, both to our service providers and to our regulators. So let’s go!
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The other day, I heard someone refer to a “rimshot” to punctuate a trite joke, and I thought that was the wrong term. So, of course, I looked it up — and it is the wrong term: a rimshot is a drum sound made by hitting the rim of the drum with the middle of a drumstick and the head of the drum with the tip of the drumstick at the same time. Here’s an illustration.
The “joke” sound, which you can hear here, is correctly called a “sting”, thought calling it (incorrectly) a rimshot, as that web site does, is very common.
Anyway, when I looked “rimshot” up on dictionary.com, I got this:
No results found for rimshot:
Did you mean mishit?
No, I didn’t, of course. But I have to say that when I first read “mishit”, I did not parse it as “mis - hit”. “What on Earth?,” said I.
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I recently watched the movie MASH — one of the best movies of the 1970s — for the gazillionth time, and noted something that had never caught my eye before: the screenplay was by Ring Lardner. Surprised, I pulled out my borrowed copy of Shut Up, He Explained, a collection of Ring Lardner rarities — I suspect that my friends from whom I borrowed it have long forgotten the loan; with luck, they’re not reading these pages — and had a look. Indeed, Mr Lardner died in 1933, long before the penning of the Korean War story (and, for that matter, long before the Korean War).
Ah, right: Ring Lardner, Jr. That last bit’s important. The younger Mr Lardner, son of the elder one, was a noted screenwriter who was imprisoned for refusing to answer questions posed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and had been fired and blacklisted by the studios as a result. As it turned out, his script was actually barely used in the movie, director Robert Altman preferring to have the actors improvise their parts. According to the extras on the DVD, Mr Lardner (Junior) was very much upset by that turn. He was, nonetheless, given sole credit for the screenplay, and, ironically, amid five nominations, the only Academy Award the movie won was for Mr Lardner’s work.
Junior.
I started thinking about other “Junior” folks in the entertainment industry — not the children of stars with different names (Liza Minnelli, Keifer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, Angelina Jolie, Michael Douglas, Mariska Hargitay, and many, many others), but ones who actually wear the “Junior” vest. In many cases, it’s the Juniors we know better than the fathers, at least as my generation sees it.
I grew up with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, playing an FBI agent, and before that, in 77 Sunset Strip. Efrem, Senior, was a world renowned violinist, who retired from playing before I was born.
Sammy Davis, Jr, was one my my parents’ favourite performers, and I enjoyed his singing, dancing, and acting when I was a child. His father was a dancer who taught his son and got Junior’s career started. The younger Sammy’s star shone much brighter than the elder’s.
Ed Begley was a well known actor, who appeared in another of my favourite films, 12 Angry Men, and who won an Academy Award a few years later. He guest starred on a number of television shows that I watched as a child. Years later, I watched Ed Begley, Jr, in St Elsewhere, and he’s long been an environmental activist.
It’s easy to drop the “Junior”, and forget where the Senior was, in his day. And it’s funny how that seems less likely when the two generations don’t share one name.
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It’s been too long since I’ve written an installment of the series on faulty logic. It’s time to continue it, with...
There was a time when pretty much everyone thought that the Earth was flat. There was a time when anyone who thought about it was sure the sun went around the Earth. Come to mention it, there was a time when that was widely attributed to its having a ride on Apollo’s chariot. These were popular ideas.
But an idea’s popularity doesn’t make it right; it only makes it popular.
Of course, we use popularity to sell products all the time. “Mr Coffee is the best-selling drip coffee maker,” was presented to us as a reason to buy Mr Coffee. We’re urged to buy the best-selling aspirin and the most popular car, and to shop “Where America Shops.”
And an argument we often hear for the existence of God is that most people believe it. “Billions of people can’t be wrong.”
Well, yes, they can. Popularity doesn’t imply truth. We’ve spent a lot if time believing popular things, favouring popular things, supporting popular things... until they were no longer popular.
Now, we may, indeed, infer something useful from popularity when it comes to buying products. A brand might be the most popular because it really is the best. Then, again, the popularity could be due to good marketing and wide distribution and availability. It’s most useful to look at why it’s the best-selling pasta sauce or the most popular brand of cat food.
With scientific issues and the like, there’s also some value in considering “popularity”, but, here, in a different sense: where do the experts stand, who have studied the subject and know it intimately? In this case we’re not applying faulty logic, through appeal to popularity, but, as in the appeal to authority discussion, we’re looking to appropriate experts for their expert opinions.
Likewise, we could get the opinions of trained, expert food tasters for opinions on the best brands of food. We might poll those who prepare coffee professionally for their thoughts on the best coffee makers.
But our experts still need to have some sort of data behind their opinions, and we have to be careful in how we choose. Who, for instance, might we go to for expert opinions on God? One’s very assertion of oneself as an expert presupposes God’s existence.[1] Experts in astrology, homeopathy, and feng shui are fine if you think these things are real and are looking for advice on that basis. But they won’t do us any good for studying the validity of the basic assumptions, and then we go back to the fallacy that popularity implies truth.
Appeal to Popularity: Just because a lot of people think something’s true, doesn’t make it so.
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I’ve been critical, here, of patents that seem to have been issued for ideas that don’t represent much innovation (most recently, this one), extending existing “prior art” only a little, or not at all. Many patents, particularly for computer software, describe things that are neither novel nor non-obvious.
Contrast that with this product (pointed out on BoingBoing recently), which really seems to be a neat, original, useful, idea that is a significant step beyond the prior art.
Of course, you know that’s got to be patented. And, indeed, a quick search at the US PTO came up with U.S. patent number 7,107,634, “Method and apparatus for cleaning a conduit” (and there’s an follow-on application pending that adds the “self-cleaning” feature).
Of course, this isn’t computer software, and part of my point has always been that physical inventions are easier to distinguish and to justify than software mechanisms are. When you can actually build it and look at it, you can readily show how it improves on what’s been made before... and it’s also easy to see if it’s substantially the same as something else.
Lots of people in the Boing Boing comments section are criticizing the design of this, and perhaps they’re right — perhaps this is a seemingly good idea that won’t work out in practice. But it sure looks interesting and useful... and it’s certainly an example of the sort of innovation the patent process was meant to foster.
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I read this item on BoingBoing:
My parents are moving out of the home I grew up in next month, which means I have to go through all my stuff and get rid of most of it. I’m donating my old clothes and manga and stashing away photo albums in a storage box, but my biggest dilemma is this: what should I do with my high school CD collection?...and I thought a few things; you might say that I had an epiphany:
None of the music she talks about considering whether to save is anything I’d ever THINK of listening to. (Well, except for the Cranberries; I actually do have a Cranberries CD, but that’s the group she’s rejecting most definitively.)
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In a story that hasn’t seemed to have drawn too much press notice, we finally have a Federal court decision, closing out 2009, that police officers can be sued for inappropriate Taser use:
The judge noted, however, that Mr. Bryan did not threaten the officer, Brian McPherson, and was not trying to flee — all elements of a three-part test that the United States Supreme Court has used to determine when significant force is justified. As for the third factor in the court’s test, the severity of the offense at issue, the Ninth Circuit judges observed that “traffic violations generally will not support the use of a significant level of force.”
The court found that the policeman’s use of force so exceeded the threat posed by Mr. Bryan that it denied his request for immunity for his actions and for a quick dismissal of the case against him. Instead, the judges will allow the case to go forward.
This is truly good news. If you’ve been reading these pages for some time, perhaps you’re tired of how often I point out some excesses of Taser use, but it’s a very serious problem, and will only get worse as technology provides authorities with more and more weapons that leave little or no evidence when they’re abused.
One might slough this decision off as something handed down by an “activist” court; more than half of the Ninth Circuit judges were appointed by Presidents Carter and Clinton. Judge Wardlaw, who wrote this decision, is a Clinton appointee, and has been reported to be on President Obama’s list for possible upcoming Supreme Court nominations. And perhaps it’s true that the more conservative Fifth or Tenth Circuits would have decided differently.
As it stands, though, unless the U.S. Supreme Court is asked to review this case, agrees to, and overturns the decision, this will have a profound effect on the use of Tasers by police departments through the country.
And it should.
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The New York Times published, the other day, an editorial about the security system failure that allowed the underpants bomber to get as far as he did. The editorial addresses, in part, the “whole body scanners” that are suddenly in greater favour:
The machines have been criticized by privacy advocates. We’ve had some qualms, too, especially with early versions that showed the outlines of a naked body too clearly. But security officials have managed to blur the images and adopted other procedures that should allay those concerns. What is needed is a rigorous and independent process of evaluation for whole body scanners and other equipment — the Transportation Security Administration has 10 at some stage of development — to figure out what provides the best security at the most rational cost.
In the letters to the editor in response to the editorial, one Steven Cohen comments on the privacy issue:
To the Editor:
You express some reservations about the use of full-body imaging detection systems for airport security and have some “qualms” about “early versions that showed the outlines of a naked body too clearly.”
Are you kidding?
The mere fact that these effective body scanners are discomforting to some privacy advocates shows a sexual uptightness we must overcome when lives are at risk. This is not about voyeurism. It’s about deterring every choice of concealment made by an extremist. To raise our comfort level with trained airport security personnel examining our body images, we need to trust their professionalism, as we do with physicians.
Steven Cohen
I’d normally agree with Mr Cohen that our sexual attitudes and the approach to nudity in our society are silly and stuck in an earlier century. At some level, it’s true that we just need to get over it.
But there’s more going on here. There are consistent reports, more than enough to establish credibility, that those selected in the past for screening by these machines are disproportionately those whom the screeners would like to see naked (spelling it out, here: women with nice bodies). As it’s implemented on the ground, at the airports, by the screeners, it is very much about voyeurism.
As with all of these sorts of things, not all TSA screeners are, nor want to be, peeping Toms; surely the vast majority are not. And, to be sure, there are physicians who violate their patients’ trust, yet we must trust them in general, nonetheless. But the comparison Mr Cohen makes is inapt.
The “trained airport security personnel” are not highly paid professionals who’ve spent years in detailed education and supervised training with the goal of helping to heal people. It’s a low-paid job for which people off the street get minimal training before being assigned to an airport security queue. Despite my belief that most of them are well meaning and proud of the jobs they do, I’m sorry: I do not, in general, trust their professionalism, both because of what I see for myself and because of the reports of others.
As it stands, passengers have a choice between these machines or a “pat down”. Before that changes, and submission to the scanning machines is required, we do have to deal with the issue of voyeurism.
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The other day, while getting my car’s oil changed, I sat in the waiting room of the car shop along with a man and his young daughter, who were watching the television. The news report was talking about the underwear bomber, referring to him as “the suspect.”
Girl: He’s a suspect?
Dad: That’s right.
Girl, impressed: Ooooooh!
Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:
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I like to freshly grind a peppercorn mix, with black and red and green peppercorns together, and I go through a lot of it. I’ve found a brand that I can readily get, which isn’t too expensive, and which comes in a large enough bottle that I don’t have to buy it too often.
I just bought a new bottle, and to the right is a photo of the old bottle, on the left, and the new one, on the right (click to enlarge). It’s the same brand — they’ve changed the label, as they tend to do. But that’s not all they’ve changed. It’s hard to tell, even with them side by side, but the new bottle is ever so slightly smaller. And look at the labels: on the left, net weight 286 grams; on the right, 276 grams. They’ve given me 3.5% less product, along with some 5% increase in the price of the package — an effective price increase of 8.8%.
I wrote about this sort of thing before, a little more than two years ago, but that’s long enough that I thought I’d mention it again. I find the ethics of it questionable, especially when the manufacturers seek to hide the reduction. Technically, they’re being honest: the package lists the weight of the contents, and they’re not lying about that. But they’re relying on people not looking at the numbers too closely, and they’ve designed the container so that you can’t tell it’s gotten smaller.
Indeed, when I bought the new bottle I was pleased that the price hadn’t gone up more than it had. It was only when I compared the bottles (and labels) that I realized it had gone up by more than I’d thought.
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Today we turn over another digit in our year numbering. It is rather arbitrary — purely a chance of how many fingers we have that prompted us to adopt a base-10 numbering system — but we give it some extra significance.
If we’d happened to’ve had six fingers per hand, and we thus used a duodecimal system, we’d call this year 1-1-11-6, or 11B6 if we say A=10 and B=11. Of course, we’d actually have digits for 10 and 11 in that case. Anyway, it would be another six years before we’d turn over a digit — two digits, in fact, in the year 1200 (decimal 2016). In hexadecimal (base 16), we’d now be starting the year 7DA; in octal (base 8) it would be 3732.
How we count the years — when we start the count, and how long the years are — is also arbitrary (though the year length does need to be approximately the same in the long run), and there are differing versions. By Jewish reckoning, we started the year 5770 back in September. The Islamic calendar had us entering 1431 two weeks ago. In the Persian calendar the year is 1388, and we’ll start 1389 at the vernal equinox, 21 March. And the Chinese will welcome the Year of the Tiger on the 14th of February — there’s no firm starting point (epoch), but a common one will have us in the year 4707.
And in the now-dead Julian calendar, in use in Russia until 1918, today is still the 19th of December, 2009; the Julian new year won’t happen until what we now call January 14th.
In any case, most of us in much of the world look at this as a notable day. And so it is now noted in these pages. I wish everyone a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2010.
Update, 2 Jan: The 360 blog has this post about interesting things related to the number 2010. And 360 points us to this similar one from MathNotations.
I am not a number!
I am a free man!
(Click the image to see the blogroll.)
