This one is a tad unsettling.
Category Archives: Video
The Right Tool for the Job
The Double-Edged Sword
This Is How Easy It is For Thieves To Steal Everything In Your Wallet
Providence’s NBC 10 took an identity theft expert to the streets to show consumers how easy it is. He slipped an RFID card scanner (you can find them on eBay for as little as 50 bucks) into an iPad case and went to town.
The worst part is there’s virtually no way to protect yourself from scanners other than investing in a special wallet or credit card sleeves that block them. They can read straight through handbags and coat pockets.
Merchants probably love them because they speed up processing. However, the banks issuing the credit cards are still on the hook for fraud, so I have to wonder how much of a problem this really is in practice. As the report mentions, your name and the security code are not encoded.
What Goes Up, Must Come Down
Having a Fling
All The Things I Am Not
As presented by Leonard McCoy, Julian Bashir, and the Emergency Medical Holographic program.
One, Two, Three, Many
This is a concept I can recall astonishing me, and also steering me away from majoring in math. I knew the abstract rabbit hole would go much deeper.
P … O … P
I’m thinking that there are probably clear pots one could use for this, so as to not get showered with hot oil.
She's So Deliciously Low
The Indelible Stamp of our Lowly Origins
I’ve been a participant in the evolution-creation struggle, from years ago on USENET in talk.origins, so I’ve heard all the blather at the beginning, many times. I was aware of the chromosome fusion between other apes and humans, but unaware how well the recent DNA sequencing had addressed the issue. It’s near the end.
The Essential Parts are Not Too Complicated, and the Principle is Easily Explained
A film produced by the NPL Film Unit in the 1950s explaining the principles behind the first accurate atomic clock, designed by Louis Essen and built at the National Physical Laboratory in 1955.
I notice they were talking about achieving good vacuum while showing someone handling a vacuum component with their bare hands, which you wouldn’t normally do — fingerprints outgas. But it was the oven, so all of that junk gets baked off pretty quickly.
The mention a performance of a ten-thousandth of a million, or a part in 10^10. Clocks/frequency standards in use today (i.e. part of time scales, reporting their values) do ~100,000 times better, and experimental ones do even better than that, albeit for relatively short durations.
That device, which is a “physics package” (all the fun stuff) plus 6 equipment racks, now fits into about 6″ of space in a single equipment rack … and the devices are orders of magnitude better.