Today I Learned

[jedishrfu]

TIL that Wikipedia is in fact a commercial website and only money counts. Pure politics behind the scenes. Time to quote nLab instead. nLab has a higher scientific value anyway.

In support of your TIL:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/wikipedias-deep-ties-to-big-tech

https://www.courthousenews.com/google-agrees-to-pay-for-wikipedia-content/

 

[jedishrfu]

I noticed that even phys.org has gone through these types of wikipedia events where some editor wanted to delete the phys.org page. You can see reminents of their discussion on their talk page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Phys.org

I posted an article many years ago about a programming language I used while working at GE. It was a text processing language named TEX (Honeywell) and was quite innovative at the time. In some ways it was comparable to AWK which came out around the same time. I think their lineages were linked by virtue of Multics being developed by GE and ATT prior to ATT pulling out and developing Unix in the aftermath.

An editor wanted to delete the article because they couldn't find anything online. I had to track down references to a 3 part Interface Age article on the language written by Bob Bemer.

Later another editor ruined my examples thinking some of the syntax was wrong as TEX used some funky multicharacter string operators xyz']10 vs xyz]'10 which meant split the string xyz at position 10 and either save the left portion ( '] ) or save the right portion ( ]' ) The editor thought I was missing a single quote and so added them in.

In one news article, I argued against showing the victim's image on the page that it was painful to the family to see this on wikipedia but got pushback because "its news". However, in every other referenced wikipedia page on murder they didn't show the victims face.

After that I stopped posting on Wikipedia.

 

[berkeman]

TIL that in California the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) adjusts the normal 5-year expiration period of driver's licenses from every 5 years to every 4 years for those "lucky" folks where were born on February 29th in leap years. Kind of makes sense I guess.

 

[nsaspook]

Which, of likely many more, cheap Video Doorbells are a security hazard.
https://www.consumerreports.org/hom...or-retailers-have-security-flaws-a2579288796/

On a recent Thursday afternoon, a Consumer Reports journalist received an email containing a grainy image of herself waving at a doorbell camera she’d set up at her back door.

If the message came from a complete stranger, it would have been alarming. Instead, it was sent by Steve Blair, a CR privacy and security test engineer who had hacked into the doorbell from 2,923 miles away.

"Ah, the regular reminder that the S in IoT stands for security."

 

[Borg]

Which, of likely many more, cheap Video Doorbells are a security hazard.
https://www.consumerreports.org/hom...or-retailers-have-security-flaws-a2579288796/

"Ah, the regular reminder that the S in IoT stands for security."

For those who haven't heard of it, Shodan is a site that allows you to find things that are connected to the internet. Since many people stupidly don't change the default passwords on their devices, this provides hackers with an easy way to find your device and check to see if the default password still works.

I put a Raspberry Pi on the internet for a while and Shodan picked it up within hours. I was tracking access attempts and saw multiple attempts from various European countries over the course of several months. One IP Address resolved to the middle of Red Square. I have no doubt that sites like Shodan make it easy for them to find potential locations to install bots.

Shodan is a search engine that lets users search for various types of servers (webcams, routers, servers, etc.) connected to the internet using a variety of filters.[1] Some have also described it as a search engine of service banners, which are metadata that the server sends back to the client.[2] This can be information about the server software, what options the service supports, a welcome message or anything else that the client can find out before interacting with the server.

 

[pinball1970]

Following on from the G string conversation.

A study on dissonance, turns out we like a little.

@f95toli @symbolipoint
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45812-z

 

[Hornbein]

As a Harvard undergrad I was in a jazz band with trumpeter Ferric Fang, playing ebass for a preppy party where I was exposed to the exotic custom of gatoring. Today I learned that Ferric is a big shot in the unearthing of data fraud. As long as he keeps his mustache he looks pretty much the same.

Ferric Fang

​

 

[phinds]

Today (yesterday, actually) I learned that the peace sign derived from the semaphore flags for N and D, and stands for Nuclear Disarmament. I looked it up on the Internet just to be sure I wasn't having my leg pulled.

 

[pinball1970]

T.I.L. CERN have links to a free on line library

https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/enabling-open-access-books

 

[BillTre]

 

[pinball1970]

T.I.L. Worms at Chernobyl -

I was going to put in Biology but I am getting a few contradictory statements IMO.

From the article https://phys.org/news/2024-03-tiny-worms-tolerate-chornobyl.html

"The researchers were surprised to find that using several different analyses, they could not detect a signature of radiation damage on the genomes of the worms from Chornobyl.

"This doesn't mean that Chornobyl is safe—it more likely means that nematodes are really resilient animals and can withstand extreme conditions,"

So resistant to radiation?

Later on in the article

"Their findings suggest that worms from Chornobyl are not necessarily more tolerant of radiation and the radioactive landscape has not forced them to evolve."

From the paper https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2314793121

"Chornobyl isolates were not systematically more resistant than strains from undisturbed habitats. In sum, the absence of mutational signatures does not reflect unique capacity for tolerating DNA damage."

Am I being a bit thick here? I do not have access to the full article so cannot read the conclusions/discussion.

 

[BillTre]

 

[Ibix]

TIL that some light aircraft come with parachutes - not for the crew, for the whole plane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Airframe_Parachute_System

 

[Ibix]

Should have posted how I found out about it - a recent deployment:

The video is a minute and a half and mostly air traffic control communications, but there's some mobile phone footage at the end of the thing coming down.

 

[BillTre]

TIL:

there are an estimated 2.5 million “modern” ants for each person on the planet, distributed across about 16,000 named species and possibly an equal number of species yet to be described.

 

[BillTre]

Its Pi day:

 

[BillTre]

TIL about the current Mars rover mission in a little review in a Science magazine news report.
It can be found here.
A pdf of a research report is here.
I have a Science subscription (membership actually) so I'm not sure of the current paywall situation, but you used to be able to see one or more articles free/month.

Its basically a remote geological survey of certain areas (river delta flowing into a crater-filling lake of water millions of years ago) on Mars considered to have a higher chance of preserving signs of life in the rocks. Some instruments on the rover can do some examinations, but material is also being cached for later pick-up and return to earth for further examinations in labs.

Decisions will soon have to be made on where the rover goes next, back into the crater of outward to different kinds of rocks. Other budgetary decisions will influence these choices.

 

[dlgoff]

T.I.L Albert Einstein was born on PI day.

 

[BillTre]

 

[Swamp Thing]

TIL that a primitive form of the light emitting diode (LED) was discovered in 1907.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Discovery_of_the_light_emitting_diode_(LED)

In 1907 British Marconi engineer Henry Joseph Round noticed that when direct current was passed through a silicon carbide (carborundum) point contact junction, a spot of greenish, bluish, or yellowish light was given off at the contact point. Round had constructed a light emitting diode (LED). However he just published a brief two paragraph note about it and did no further research.

 

[Swamp Thing]

When was the first all-solid-state superhet radio reciever built?

Spoiler

In the 1920s, experimenters discovered "negative resistance" effects in point-contact crystal rectifiers. They exploited this property to make amplifiers and oscillators. Russian physicist Oleg Losev took this technology to the ultimate level:

The first person to exploit negative resistance practically was self-taught Russian physicist Oleg Losev, who devoted his career to the study of crystal detectors. In 1922 working at the new Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory he discovered negative resistance in biased zincite (zinc oxide) point contact junctions. He realized that amplifying crystals could be an alternative to the fragile, expensive, energy-wasting vacuum tube. He used biased negative resistance crystal junctions to build solid-state amplifiers, oscillators, and amplifying and regenerative radio receivers, 25 years before the invention of the transistor. Later he even built a superheterodyne receiver.

He died in 1942, so a few years before the Bell Labs point contact transistor was invented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Crystodyne:_negative_resistance_diodes

http://www-smirc.stanford.edu/papers/chapter1.pdf

 

[BillTre]

TIL learned that National Napping Day was created to help make up for the sleep lost during the time change from daylight savings.
It seems the day celebrated varies, often just after the time change.

NATIONAL NAPPING DAY HISTORY
William Anthony, Ph.D., a Boston University Professor, and his wife, Camille Anthony, created National Napping Day in 1999 as an effort to spotlight the health benefits to catching up on quality sleep. "We chose this particular Monday because Americans are more ‘nap-ready’ than usual after losing an hour of sleep to daylight saving time," Anthony said in B.U.’s press release.

 

[berkeman]

TIL about the Kopp-Etchells Effect, which can produce glowing rings from propeller aircraft operating in sandy environments. I'd never heard of this striking visual effect before...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopp–Etchells_effect

Helicopter rotors are fitted with abrasion shields along their leading edges to protect the blades. These abrasion strips are often made of titanium, stainless steel, or nickel alloys, which are very hard, but not as hard as sand. When a helicopter flies low to the ground in sandy environments, sand can strike the metal abrasion strip and cause erosion, which produces a visible corona or halo around the rotor blades.

The effect is caused by the pyrophoric oxidation of the ablated metal particles.[6][7] In this way, the Kopp–Etchells effect is similar to the sparks made by a grinder, which are also due to pyrophoricity.[8] When a speck of metal is chipped off the rotor, it is heated by rapid oxidation. This occurs because its freshly exposed surface reacts with oxygen to produce heat. If the particle is sufficiently small, then its mass is small compared to its surface area, and so heat is generated faster than it can be dissipated. This causes the particle to become so hot that it reaches its ignition temperature. At that point, the metal continues to burn freely.[9]

Abrasion strips made of titanium produce the brightest sparks,[2][10] and the intensity increases with the size and concentration of sand grains in the air.[11]

 

[phinds]

Very cool. Thanks for posting, Mike.

 

[sbrothy]

I must admit this isn't exactly new knowledge to me but perhaps some of you (at least those without a degree in CS) haven't heard of it. Computers have been using so called speculative execution for optimization for some time. It's not a new thing and it's not the only optimization technique in use. I still find it kinda creepy. When we're talking about AI and the dangers thereof I'm sometimes baffled with how convoluted and advanced "ordinary" computers have become.

I'd love to see spintronics become a reality but I doubt it'll be in my lifetime - if at all. When I say becmoe reality I mean ofcourse in more widespread use. Shouldn't it theoretically be able to double processing power?

https://m.xkcd.com/1938/

 

[Swamp Thing]

https://m.xkcd.com/1938/

Is rowhammer really a thing?

 

[sbrothy]

Is rowhammer really a thing?

Yup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

the milw0rm site was the goto site foor up to date exploits like that. It's closed now though. I haven't kept up. Dunno if anyone took up the challenge.

And if you want to learn to "hack", the magic word to search for is "pentesting" (as in penetration testing).

 

[sbrothy]

Yup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

the milw0rm site was the goto site foor up to date exploits like that. It's closed now though. I haven't kept up. Dunno if anyone took up the challenge.

And if you want to learn to "hack", the magic word to search for is "pentesting" (as in penetration testing).

Speaking of hacking this one is right on the money:

https://xkcd.com/932/

I don't remember how many web- and appservers I've set up. But if anyone managed to gain root access the vast majority was merely a frontend for some mainframe with old legacy code noone dared touch.

The webserver would talk with the backend using either CICS, MSMQ or - oh the horror *shudder* - an encrypted socket using a bespoke protocol.

If database access was needed the specific data, which would be the bare minimum, would likely be cached on a dedicated server where the mainframe would unload a bunch of data from time to time. Virtually a cul-de-sac.

But then you read about exploits like Rowhammer and you realize the lengths people will go to. And sometimes just for the challenge itself!

I'm flabbergasted! (This entire post was just an excuse for using that word;) ).

 

[mathwonk]

Am I the only one to check the expansions in Bill Tre's pi posts? I was struck by the apparent error in the berry pie version, which looked off to me, although as it turns out merely (correctly) rounded up. The pearls before swine version is more in line with my approach to such things, as being only truncated. If you own Euler's Introduction to Analysis of the infinite, or even its earlier Latin version I believe, you have no doubt been shocked by the error in about the 113th place of the expansion of pi in the work of that famous Swiss citizen, (who was apparently unknown to the apocryphal Orson Welles). I presume this error the work of the printer.

 

[BillTre]

"Atheism is a non-prophet organization".
--George Carlin