Monthly Archives: June 2009

I Dare You to Steal this Story

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Ralph Nader with a slim jim.

The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit

Thinking like a criminal is Tobias’ idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you’ve never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He’s the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.

Lock-breaking is equal parts art and science. So is the ability to royally piss people off. Tobias is a veritable da Vinci at both endeavors. His Web site’s streaming video of prepubescent kids gleefully opening gun locks has won him no points with mothers or locksmiths, and his ideas about how to smuggle liquid explosive reagents onto commercial airlines spookily presaged the Transportation Security Administration’s prohibitions against carry-on liquids. Over the past 20 years, Tobias has been threatened by casinos, banned from hotel chains, and bullied by legions of corporate lawyers. And enjoyed every minute of it.

I don’t know which is worse: the ones who overplay the threat to make us afraid, or (as in the story) the ones who overplay the quality of security to make us feel safe.

Wrong! Or Maybe Not.

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Fingerprints and Grip – Wrong vs Incomplete

I saw the headline to one version of the linked story (Fingerprint grip theory rejected) a few days back. I didn’t delve too deeply into it, and this thought had not occurred to me:

What struck me, and what the article did not mention, is that glass is a very artificial material. It is unlikely that our ancestors would have encountered such smooth material often in their day-to-day lives. Therefore there would not have been much selective pressure to develop a good grip on glass or similarly smooth material. Tree branches, rocks, fur, bones, and other materials that might find their way into the grasp of a hominid or ape are much rougher than glass.

Clearly follow up research is needed. How do fingerprints behave when applied to other materials, and how does wetness affect their utility?

What did pique my interest was a different version of the story (or headline, at least): Urban Myth Disproved: Fingerprints Do Not Improve Grip Friction. I had not considered that this was an “urban myth.” If it hadn’t been tested, then it was an hypothesis, and in need of testing. I don’t really hang with the “what good are fingerprints” crowd, so I don’t really have a grip —ridge-augmented or not — on how this viewpoint was being advertised. In any case, though, I agree that the process has been mischaracterized — the media has sensationalized the discovery by casting the results as some sort of paradigm shift rather than an incremental additional of knowledge.

What interested me most about this story is how the media channels science news stories into a few themes with which they feel comfortable. Debunking a commonly held myth is one of those themes. While this story hold a kernel of that theme – it is more accurate to say, in my opinion, not that the grip hypothesis is wrong but that the story is more complex.

That is a much more useful theme for science reporting – because the story is almost always more complex – more complex than the typical publish understanding, and even of our previous scientific understanding.

Likewise, it is more meaningful in many cases to portray our prior models and theories not as “wrong” but as incomplete. Sometimes they are wrong, but that needs to be distinguished from ideas that are oversimplified and therefore incomplete, but not wrong.

Q and A

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Over at Uncertain Principles there’s a link to topic that seems to have alighted on several vertices of the blogohedron. Deep, or at least deep-sounding, essay questions appear on the French baccalaureate exam (which is apparently their version of the US SAT/ACT) and the debate is whether this implies that our standards are lower because we do not ask such questions. Answers Matter More than Questions

And, not too surprisingly, Chad sticks the landing:

What matters is not whether you ask ostentatiously intellectual questions of your students, but whether the answers they give are any good. It’s very nice to ask students to write essays on the topic “Does language betray thought?,” but it’s really easy to imagine getting a whole slew of responses that strain to reach the level of dorm-room bull sessions.

The form of the questions may indicate, as most are supposing, that the French are really doing a better job of teaching their students to think deeply about things. Or, it may mean that they’re teaching their students to traffic in pompous bullshit. There’s no way to know from just the questions– you also need to know what constitutes an acceptable answer.

Precisely. And I can’t help but note that of the three linked blogs (Yglesias, Mother Jones, Tapped) there is only sentence that goes beyond a yes/no answer to the questions (can’t say whether this omission is an expression of irony, though). The important thing isn’t whether you can say yes or no, it’s making a convincing case for why you think that’s the correct answer. Or, as we in the science and engineering fields say, show your work.

The Tearjerker

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Pixar grants girl’s dying wish to see ‘Up’

From the minute Colby saw the previews to the Disney-Pixar movie Up, she was desperate to see it. Colby had been diagnosed with vascular cancer about three years ago, said her mother, Lisa Curtin, and at the beginning of this month it became apparent that she would die soon and was too ill to be moved to a theater to see the film.

After a family friend made frantic calls to Pixar to help grant Colby her dying wish, Pixar came to the rescue.

Pardon me, I seem to have a condensation problem on the interior of my ocular assistance apparatus [sniff].

Putting the "Vent" in "Inventory"

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It’s getting to be inventory time again, and that usually invokes trepidation and stirs the nightmares of the ghost of bureaucracy past. Somebody, somewhere, needs to know that all that shiny equipment you’ve purchased hasn’t walked off, and that’s fair enough — I’m spending somebody else’s money, and they have the right to know that if I’ve used it to buy a new 60″ plasma monitor, that it’s not being used at home to confirm the resolution of the HD-TV ESPN signal. But I just wish they didn’t make it so painful.

Whenever an inventory-worth item gets purchased (anything over a certain dollar amount, computers, monitors and other computer-related things comprise the bulk of them) I have to tranquilize and tag it with a sticker, fill out a form to record what the item is, how much it costs, and where it will live. I bundle that form along with the duly-signed invoice and purchase request and pop it in the pneumatic tube and send it to the accounting trolls. (I kid, I kid. We don’t have a pneumatic tube system.)

And every so often someone will come around with a barcode reader and scan everything, and then the fun begins. Equipment gets mounted in racks, or moved in some way which obscures the barcode, or moved entirely out of the lab, and you end up short of what the inventory list says you have. And then the great equipment safari starts, where you try and track down the missing equipment. If you could, you’d hire the expert tracker to come in and find it — checking for electronics spoor.

Oooh. Smell that? That’s the unmistakable scent of a 1460A 100 Megahertz programmable waveform generator … and she’s a big one! (Best done in an Australian accent, for some reason)

The last time the inventory push happened, the list of the MIA only contained the barcode number, serial number and a generic description — nothing else. So there’s this list that has a dozen entries with two numbers followed by “computer,” and we were told to go out and find them. What the? All that extra information on the inventory sheets that would have helped — all the useful stuff like make, model, owner and room number, was not given to us. The serial number does no good, since it’s hidden just like the barcode is (or else it would have been scanned already). It’s not like we humans refer to the machines by either number (I don’t know about the trolls). “Joe’s Mac that’s supposed to be in 329 is missing on the inventory” is a lot more useful than “computer XWK19886FG32Q is missing.” I’m wiser now, and all that information also lives locally on a spreadsheet. I know someone who went as far as photographing all their inventoried equipment so they could match up inventory numbers of missing equipment with a mug shot, which would help them find the equipment.

Inevitably, some of the equipment is just missing. Lent and never returned, or disposed of improperly because the sticker was hidden, and then begins the paperwork to explain all of that. Ugh.

And it’s not like this is tremendously different than places I’ve been in the past. I recall a conversation with the bookkeeper when I was in grad school, which went something like this:

I’m filling out the inventory form for this purchase of a “30/70, 1″ nonpolarizing beamsplitter cube.” What is it, and what does it do?

Well, it’s a cube, 1″ on a side, that splits a beam 30% one way and 70% the other, regardless of and not affecting the polarization of the light.

That won’t fit on the form. You said it’s optics? Like a lens?

Well, it’s sort of like a lens, in a very vague sense, in that you can send light through it.

Can I put down “lens?”

No.

OK. I’ll fit the whole description in, somehow. Here’s the sticker.

You can’t put a sticker on it.

Why not?

Because it’s optics! An expensive piece of optics that will be ruined if you put an inventory sticker on it!

I have a colleague who went through a similar discussion concerning a component that lived in their vacuum system. The compromise was to put the sticker on the shelf where the component would live if it weren’t in the vacuum system.

I’m sure I’ll survive this, somehow. But in any event, have a weekend, enjoyable, one each.

Which One was 'Big X'?

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Prairie dogs return to Md. Zoo. Keepers scramble as animals try to escape.

When the animals were let out of their crates into their new habitat Wednesday, not all sought to escape. More than a few seemed happy to take a noontime siesta. Others were more interested in a lunch of biscuits, kale, apples, carrots, alfalfa hay and mulberry leaves.

But a few intrepid prairie dogs tried to find their way out, sending keepers scrambling to plug escape routes.

The one that looked like Steve McQueen managed to steal a motorcycle, but didn’t make it out.

Telling It Like it Is

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Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News

It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

[…]

Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….”

Finance reporting, I think is an especially egregious offense by reporters. Think about it — no matter what happens in the stock market, the reporters will have some cause ascribed to it. And they’re just making it up. Most days the stock market signal is just noise.