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three random things make a post
Oct. 6th, 2013 10:56 pmsince i've been sick, i haven't posted a few interesting things...
1) in the least surprising of the NSA revelations, the spooks are trying to attack TOR. real shocker there; in fact, if they weren't trying, i'd have the folks who run the place fired.
also no surprise that they're using traffic analysis and TOR nodes they control to undermine the silly thing. those are the obvious routes of attack for any national government. as of the secret report's date (june 2012), the NSA didn't control enough TOR nodes to do anything significant to TOR, but that's just a matter of getting more nodes on it, which is mostly a HUMINT/social engineering problem. (technical means will work somewhat, but why bother with those if you can just convince people to trust your pet relay?)
2) take with salt:
from Nightmares and bedtime stories, in the economist, which relies on data from "real clear politics"'s Public Approval of Health Care Law. which in turn relies on how the pollsters asked their questions and surveyed the country, so i'd salt this to taste.
3) ...andon the fifth day during the cambrian explosion, random forces created a whole shipload of living things:
a simplified chart of when the major groups of living things appeared:
the red box indicates the period the authors were discussing, which ends just after the cambrian explosion.
and a spaghetti plot showing the complexity of what actually happened (current best guesses):
(more legible but much larger version)
both from Causes of the Cambrian Explosion, by m. paul smith and david a. t. harper.
in short, the authors write that geological changes (in red boxes in the chart) ultimately caused the origin of life as we know it today. sea level rise begat erosion; erosion begat calcium pouring into the seas; lots of calcium in the water begat critters trying to get rid of it; and having calcium to ditch led to biomineralization (bones and shells). and likewise for the other child of sea level rise: shallow seas increasing the world's habitable volume... and so on. so, all the fancy biology we're used to -- complex genomes, new body plans (bilateral ones, like us), and macrophagy (eating multicellular prey, also like us) -- seems to have started with weathering rocks.
1) in the least surprising of the NSA revelations, the spooks are trying to attack TOR. real shocker there; in fact, if they weren't trying, i'd have the folks who run the place fired.
also no surprise that they're using traffic analysis and TOR nodes they control to undermine the silly thing. those are the obvious routes of attack for any national government. as of the secret report's date (june 2012), the NSA didn't control enough TOR nodes to do anything significant to TOR, but that's just a matter of getting more nodes on it, which is mostly a HUMINT/social engineering problem. (technical means will work somewhat, but why bother with those if you can just convince people to trust your pet relay?)
2) take with salt:
from Nightmares and bedtime stories, in the economist, which relies on data from "real clear politics"'s Public Approval of Health Care Law. which in turn relies on how the pollsters asked their questions and surveyed the country, so i'd salt this to taste.
3) ...and
a simplified chart of when the major groups of living things appeared:
the red box indicates the period the authors were discussing, which ends just after the cambrian explosion.
and a spaghetti plot showing the complexity of what actually happened (current best guesses):
(more legible but much larger version)
both from Causes of the Cambrian Explosion, by m. paul smith and david a. t. harper.
in short, the authors write that geological changes (in red boxes in the chart) ultimately caused the origin of life as we know it today. sea level rise begat erosion; erosion begat calcium pouring into the seas; lots of calcium in the water begat critters trying to get rid of it; and having calcium to ditch led to biomineralization (bones and shells). and likewise for the other child of sea level rise: shallow seas increasing the world's habitable volume... and so on. so, all the fancy biology we're used to -- complex genomes, new body plans (bilateral ones, like us), and macrophagy (eating multicellular prey, also like us) -- seems to have started with weathering rocks.