Category Archives: Books

All the Internet's a Stage

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Here Comes Everybody Review at Bruce Schneier’s blog.

Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase’s ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight — where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase’s ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.’s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors.

What’s new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls “Coase’s Floor,” below which we find projects and activities that aren’t worth their organizational costs — things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, “That’s ridiculous.”

Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn’t it?

The review goes on to highlight a few implications of the low organizational cost of the internet. Crackpots having a wide audience is one of them.

Smells Like … a Keyboard

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Compromising your keyboard by sniffing the EM radiation signature.

We found 4 different ways (including the Kuhn attack) to fully or partially recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters, even through walls. We tested 11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008 (PS/2, USB and laptop). They are all vulnerable to at least one of our 4 attacks.

Neal Stephenson did this in Cryptonomicon. Of course, fictional events are trumped by actual results.

Navigation = Time

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I see Chad’s put a brief review of Dava Sobel’s Longitude up over at Uncertain Principles.

I read the book a few years ago and can confirm that it’s a good read. (I missed a chance to hear Sobel give a talk at a conference a few years back — I was sick (>1.0 dogs) and crashed rather than attend the talk.)

The idea behind Harrison’s solution to the longitude problem (knowing the location of a star and what time it is tells you your longitude) is still with us: ‘to know where you are, you need good clocks’ applies to GPS, too.

Meme, Too!

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Jennifer has started the great pop-sci book project, a natural evolution (and yet intelligently designed progression) of The Big Read

The rules are familiar

1. Highlight those you’ve read in full
2. Asterisk those you intend to read
3. Add any additional popular science books you think belong on the list
4. Link back to me (leave links or suggested additions in the comments, if you prefer) so I can keep track of everyone’s additions. Then we can compile it all into one giant “Top 100” popular science books list, with room for honorable mentions. (I, for one, have some quirky choices in the list below.) Voila! We’ll have awesome resource for general readers interested in delving into the fascinating world of science!

I don’t read tremendous amount of pop-sci, and not much in physics since A Brief History of Time, as I’ve gone to grad school since then and really don’t need much prose on how weird quantum mechanics and relativity are. (I had to put my foot down on getting pop-sci books as gifts after getting a pop-up book of cosmology; I felt a bit like John Cleese in a Monty Python sketch

Do you like your rattle? Do you like your rattle?
Ah, yes, the rattle.
Ooh, he’s talkin’ already
Of course I can talk, I’m the Minister for Overseas Development

But I digress.)
Continue reading →

Alan Stanwyk Murdered Me Tonight

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The Secret at St. Sans, by Terri Kay

The Secret at St. Sans spans one year and starts with the newspaper report on the drowning death of Dr. Tom Swanson. Tom, an employee at the Tanner, Meyer and Smertz medical clinic, was the son-in-law of Dr. Brian Tanner, one of the clinic owners. But Tom’s death may not be an accident, as the story goes back in time to explore.

Amazing what you find when you Google yourself.

As Long as I'm in the Neighborhood . . .

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Titanic Was Found During Secret Cold War Navy Mission

Ronald Thunman, then the deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare, told Ballard the military was interested in the technology—but for the purpose of investigating the wreckage of the U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion.

Since Ballard’s technology would be able to reach the sunken subs and take pictures, the oceanographer agreed to help out.

He then asked the Navy if he could search for the Titanic, which was located between the two wrecks.

Since the bulk of the US Navy’s nuclear fleet has been subs, most of the students I taught were destined for subs, and many of my shipmates who had done tours at sea had their dolphins. That experience piques my interest even more when stories such as this pop up. (My own brief trip on a sub was enough to seal the deal that I wouldn’t be doing that for a living. 6′ 3″ with a touch of claustrophobia wasn’t going to mix well with most of the subs active back then)

For some more discussion of the Scorpion accident, and how the location of the sub was eventually determined, I recommend Blind Man’s Bluff by Sontag and Drew. There are also stories about Project Jennifer, a mission to retrieve a Russian sub, as well as some other very interesting submarine-related espionage activities.