Category Archives: Technology

Regulating CO2

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From the Seattle Times:

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear arguments on whether the federal government must regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, a case that could have broad implications for utilities, auto manufacturers and other industries nationwide.

The high court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide in order to combat global warming.

CO2?????  If it weren’t for it being a violation of the various rights (sometimes I wonder why I should respect the rights of those that don’t respect my rights to keep and bear arms) the way I would reduce CO2 emissions would be to encourage the environmental wackos to stop breathing.  This attack from the wackos is not about “global warming” or “climate change”.  The man-made effects on the global climate are so small it’s almost impossible to measure.  Therefore the motivation for these attacks can only be attributed to something else.  Possible candidates for the real reason include anti-capitalism, a scam to make money by the proponents of these claims, and mental disorders.  I’m partial the mental disorder hypothesis myself–When Prophecy Fails successfully explains many of these nut cases.

Did you know that water vapor is a bigger contributor to the green house effect than CO2?  See also Jeff’s post on this subject.  And that when gasoline or diesel is burned it produces more water vapor (by volume, not mass) than it does CO2?  Of course we could always limit water vapor emissions from the wackos as well.

Sex with robots

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There once was a young man named Gene
who invented a screwing machine.
Concave and convex,
it served either sex,
and it played with itself in between.

Ho-hum.  This guy is worried about a “code of ethics” for robots:

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

…

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” said Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

…

Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” he said. So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?

People have been having sex with machines for decades.  I’ve commented on this before:

Ethics for robots?  That’s a nice thought but futile.  If a market exists it will be met.  If whether it’s to wage war, perform assassinations, or brothels filled with mechanical sex machines there will be some to supply the programming to accomplish the task if there is enough money on the table for the task.  Asimov’s three laws will be simply commented out in the code.

Global warming–NOT

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At least human activities aren’t a significant contributor.  Take the quiz and then read the answers.  Thanks for posting that Jeff.

Get your Windows update installed soon

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I got an email at work yesterday saying I needed to update all my Windows machines.  I did so and it seemed like there were a LOT of updates.  I updated my boxes at my “home” in the Seattle area and had James (who is staying with me until he can move into his new apartment tomorrow) do the same.  It turns out there were a very large number of updates released by Microsoft yesteday and a lot of them were for security vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities being fixed makes them known to attackers. If you haven’t updated your computer after the fixes have been released then you are, in most cases, more vulnerable than before they were released. Update your computer now.

Quote of the day–Raymond Chen

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It would be unreasonable to expect the HTML parser to be able to understand every language both present and future. (At least not until clairvoyance has been perfected.)

Raymond Chen
June 5, 2006
[I absolutely love this quote.  Understatement in the first sentence followed by the only known exception to the stated rule.  Succinct yet complete encapsulation of the situation.  Some people get annoyed at me when I find exceptions to their overly broad generalizations but I think they are an essential component of understanding the situation and almost always just trying to help.  Today, as most days, Raymond is my technological and word-smithing hero.-Joe]

Awesome understatement

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Ry says awesome.  That is an understatement.  Among the usual things to wonder about in this video I wonder about the air density.  How did he know it would be safe at that altitude?  The glide ratio is going to be severely affected compared to doing the same stunt at sea level.

Experts weigh in on ID cards

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Via Bruce Schneier.

In this case the experts are the people that make a living selling the fake cards:

(AP) Luis Hernandez just laughs as he sells fake driver’s licenses and Social Security cards to illegal immigrants near a park known for shady deals. The joke _ to him and others in his line of work _ is the government’s promise to put people like him out of business with a tamperproof national ID card.

“One way or another, we’ll always find a way,” said Hernandez, 35, a sidewalk operator who is part of a complex counterfeiting network around MacArthur Park, where authentic-looking IDs are available for as little as $150.

Basically it’s a unsolvable problem that, even if successful, won’t solve the problems the government wants it to solve.

Alien life

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There is a jar of red rain water in India that some are speculating may contain alien life:

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples—water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001—contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600˚F. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250˚F.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.


500x magnification

A few years ago I read a book in which the author(s) claimed to prove that intelligent alien life had an extremely small chance of existing.  They went through all kinds of different conditions that were “essential” for intelligent life or life of any sort for that matter.  A good friend of mine had recommended it to support his view that the Milky-way Galaxy and perhaps the entire universe was just waiting for humans to claim–no need to conquer it. 

I eagerly read the book but was extremely annoyed.  They made all these claims like “the temperature must be between X and Y degrees”, and the radiation level must be below such and such a level.  Just because life as we know it requires these conditions doesn’t mean all life has to require similar conditions.  In fact, why couldn’t life have evolved that required high levels of radiation?  Why not life that used radiation as an energy source?  Why not life that thrived in boiling water?  In fact there is life that thrives in “boiling” water.  There are certain organisms that live near geothermal vents on the ocean floor at temperatures above the normal 212 F temperature of boiling water.  The water isn’t boiling because of the great pressure but the temperature isn’t killing them.  And there are microbes, which evolved rather rapidly by the way, that eat stuff that is toxic to nearly all other life.  So why not alien life that thrives in environments that are impossible all life forms we know of?  No need to just “push the envelope” some in a direction or two.  Life, given enough time, could have evolved that is completely outside our realm of experience.

Think of it this way–We are immersed in an environment with rather tight constraints on it.  The temperature ranges from about -70F to about 120F.  Water is present at least in small quantities nearly everywhere.  Ionizing radiation is rare.  Sunlight of a particular spectral content and intensity is common.  How much experience do we have with conditions outside that realm?  It would be difficult for a water based creature, such as a dolphin or whale, to imagine how life could function on dry land.  They just don’t have the experience with it.  Or as one wag put it, “We don’t know who discovered water but we know it wasn’t a fish.”  The same with us and other, totally out of the box, environments.

This jar of red rain water may be enough to break a few boxes.

Reality is sinking in

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Canada is resisting the identity card system required by U.S. law to enter our country:

Canada will not embark on an untested identity card system to meet U.S. border concerns, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday.

His government has told the Americans it prefers not to create such a card and wouldn’t do so until the American government has convinced itself it is effective, Harper told reporters.

ID cards are not effective in solving the problems they are claimed to address.  Mandatory ID cards are a bad idea.

Give it up

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New Orleans is sinking.  Anyone who looked at the problem and had more than two brain cells to rub together knew that.  What wasn’t known was that parts of the city are sinking at a rate of over one inch per year.

Add in the inability to get pumps installed in a timely matter (it’s a tough problem, the Corp of Engineer’s has my sympathy) and my advice is they should spend their money on abandoning the city.

Living in a make believe world

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“Smart guns” are not only a dumb idea but may be impossible with todays biometric technology.  Biometrics is something I studied and successfully researched for a different application.  I’m not a stranger to biometric technology.  New Jersey thinks they can find a solution for their “smart guns” but I think they are living in a make believe world.  Here’s what they have to say about their smart gun research:

The prototype, developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, has pressure sensors embedded in the gun handle that recognize a person’s unique grip.

The team says a commercial model is up to five years away, but if it works, it will trigger a singular – and controversial – state law. Within three years, all handguns sold in New Jersey would have to be personalized, with this or some other recognition technology.

Michael Recce, who dreamed up the grip-recognition concept in 1999, said the only obstacles are time and money. “It’s an engineering problem, not a scientific problem,” he said.

…

Inside the grip, 16 ceramic discs generate a charge when pressed. They are called piezoelectric sensors, from the Greek piezo, for “pressure.” Barbecue lighters use a similar feature.

Once the shooter squeezes the trigger, the grip sensors spring into action, recording the pressure for one-tenth of a second. In that moment, the pressure applied by each finger varies enough that engineers can distinguish between shooters with a high degree of reliability. A grip’s signature does not vary significantly from firing to firing, even in stressful situations, researchers have found.

A year and a half ago, a prototype recognized authorized users nine out of 10 times. Now, the rate lies between 95 and 99 percent, said Michael Cody, a computer science engineer on the team.

The goal: at least 99.95 percent – or good enough that the recognition process fails less often than a regular gun would jam or fail. A higher success rate will require better placement of the 16 sensors; currently, four or five do most of the work.

Recognition of the authorized users isn’t enough.  It must also reject unauthorized users.  It could be they are quoting the cross-over point where both the successful rejects and the successful accepts are the same.  It’s common to distill the performance down to a single number when in fact you will seldom run your biometric device at that point on the operating curve. 

Typically you will allow a much higher rate of failure for correct rejections that you will allow failure to accept correctly.  For example you might be perfectly happy the gun rejects 90% of the unauthorized users as long as it accepts correct users greater than 99.9% of the time.  I don’t know if it is the failure of the reporter to understand the subtleties of biometrics or if it is the failure of the engineers to understand the problem.  For the time being I’ll give the benefit of doubt to the engineers on that point.

What I seriously doubt is that Reece and his team have done is evaluate real stress and adverse shooting conditions.  What is the grip like when your hands are numb and swollen from the cold?  Or slippery with blood?  Or with gloves on?  Or after you have been stabbed and/or shot by your attacker(s)?  Add in shooting strong hand only, weak hand only, and with both hands and you have a very large set of variables that you can’t program into baseline template for the authorized user without allowing a very high percentage of random people to be able to shoot the gun as well.

I believe, short of nearly instant DNA analysis, biometrics cannot solve this problem.  And even if we had DNA sensors that could respond in milliseconds it wouldn’t solve the glove and other problems.  The “magic decoder ring” type of solution is the only thing I see as viable.

Recce estimated that his revolving team of graduate students and postdocs could develop a market-ready product in five years, and that a private company could do so in three.

Estimated cost: an additional $5 million. To date, the school has received $4.4 million in state and federal funds, said Donald H. Sebastian, a university senior vice president who oversees the research.

A 2005 study by a committee of the National Academy of Engineering was less optimistic, predicting that any of the various smart guns would need five to 10 years and $30 million.

The committee recognizes the problem is much, much bigger than Reece realizes or cares to admit. 

Keep spending NJ money.  That’s fine with me.  That’s less money they have to spend on enforcing their stupid and tyrannical gun laws.

More debunking of a 9-11 conspiracy

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Some videos of the plane that hit the Pentagon were released.  From the DOD FOIA Requester Service Center:

Video 1
Video 2

A year and a half ago I spent a little time debunking that it was actually an explosive charge rather than fuel from the plane that caused the flash on the previous images that were released.  These videos should help a little bit on that front.

Phone traffic analysis

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USA Today:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

Here’s the story they don’t tell you.  Using the simple data of who called who and the times of the calls some very interesting conclusions can be made.  Out of billions of calls individual groups as small as ten people can be identified and their organizational structure mapped.  For example they can determine who the leader is and who will take his or her place if they were removed.  This was several years ago so I imagine the results are better now.  The same sort of information can be derived from email traffic as well.

I’m not sure how I stand on this.  My inclination is that if the companies who own the data are compelled to turn it over without probable cause then I’m against it.  But if it is optional and they get paid to share the information then I’m annoyed but don’t have a strong objection.

Other opinions include Michelle Malkin and Alphecca.

Dodging the weather

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Very cool video of Fedex air traffic into Memphis (their hub) as a thunderstorm rolled in.

Via Periodic Journal of my wanderings.

How do you deliver a 700 ton bomb?

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From Scripps Howard News Service:

The test scheduled for June 2 will be of a 700-ton conventional bomb. The research could aid in development of so-called bunker-buster weapons, including small-scale nuclear devices, according to the federal official overseeing the test, Doug Bruder, director of counter-weapons of mass destruction technology for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

As near as I can tell the maximum takeoff weight any 747 is about 910,000 pounds which is only 455 tons and that includes the weight of the plane and fuel.  A semi truck is much smaller.  The only remaining thing I can think of is a train and that is rather problematic for a number of reasons.

So this “demonstration”, as some are calling it, of a 700-ton bomb ammonium nitrate (Boomershoot uses AN as the main ingredient) and fuel oil bomb will be more “interesting” than just a big pile of AN detonating.  And although there may be some fuel oil in it my guess is there will be aluminum powder as well as other stuff much more interesting that just fuel oil.  This guy is openly calling it a tactical nuke instead of a conventional bomb.  Tactical nuke?  Sure, that makes sense.  You can deliver those with artillery shells as well as cruise missiles and conventional air dropped bombs.

Iran is virtually begging for someone to attack.  The Israelis claim Iran is only about a year away from having their own nuclear bomb.  Others claim more time is needed, but regardless the Mideast is a very interesting place these days.  Regardless, for us to claim there is too much sand and not enough glass in Iran before we take another hit will be a tough situation politically.  But for us to wait might mean the near total destruction of Israel.  And if we take a nuclear hit on north American soil my bet is that our retaliation will not be so “surgical” as dropping a few tactical nukes as we would prior to taking a hit.  My guess is we would turn not only massive portions of Iran into glass but Medina and few other areas as well.  Mecca would probably have a few bombers in permanent “orbit” around it for several years–just daring any Muslim extremist to set off a pipe bomb in some pizza joint on our turf.

Interesting times ahead…

Update: If you follow the links in Ry’s comments (and here) you will find the people I based my post on were totally clueless.  Which means I was totally clueless when I made the post.  Idiots.  And they made me look like an idiot.

Pushing the technological envelope with teledildonics

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It’s sort of “a dirty little secret” but I’m going to tell it anyway.  There are certain things that drive technology forward.  And, from the viewpoint of many, it’s frequently for the wrong reasons. 

War is a huge push.  Think of the jet engine, electronics (RADAR, communications, computers for ballistics calculations), rockets, aircraft, ships, photography (spying), optics, satellites, etc.   All those because of wartime need.

Business of course is a bad word with some people and that “evil” concept of “profit”.  Another big push for technology.  Robots, computers, mechanical and electrical power for the factories.

But did you realize what a big push sex was?  You certainly know that abstinence doesn’t create a market for new technology.

The first moving image I ever saw on a computer screen was a very simple, two-color image of a woman having sex with a man.  I think I may still have that around someplace.  The timing of the image was dependent on the speed of the processor and since at the time there was only one clock speed for the IBM PC, 4.77 MHz, it would run at something approaching “Warp 8” on today’s computers. 

The push for better image quality (the first color graphics screen, the CGA, only had 16 colors) on the PC was not from conventional business.  It was porn.  Programmers did some amazing tricks (for example changing the palette between scan lines) to get better pictures of naked women.

It turns out Microsoft spent a lot of time developing Net Meeting (or some such thing, I forget the exact name now) for business needs thinking that major corporations would be their biggest customers.  Well… it was “business” that first adopted it and had a lot of feedback for improving the first versions.  In fact it was a variation of the “oldest business”, or should I say “oldest profession”, that pushed the early development.

Photography, from the very earliest of days, until the present is technologically pushed by pornography.

And what do you think people used the early VCR’s and video cameras for?  It was for porn.

And the logical next step is being worked on right now:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When America’s top sex researchers gathered recently to discuss the next decade in their field, some envisioned a future in which artificial sex partners could cater to every fantasy.

“What is very likely to be present before 2016 would be a multi-sensual experience of virtual sex,” said Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington.

“There is a possibility of developing erotic materials for yourself that would allow you to create a partner of certain dimensions and qualities, the partner saying certain things in that interaction, certain things happening in that interaction.”

A field dubbed “teledildonics” already allows people at two remote computers to manipulate electronic devices such as a vibrator at the other end for sexual purposes.

“People who use it are just blown away,” said Steve Rhodes, president of Sinulate Entertainment, which has sold thousands of Internet-connected sex devices over the past three years. “This is not something that just the lunatic fringe does.”

“The Iraq war…was kind of a boom for our company.”

Gina Lynn, who writes the “Sex Drive” column for Wired magazine, says she has used and enjoyed the Sinulator and says there is no reason to fear the technology.

…

SEX WITH A PORN STAR

Entrepreneurs are also seeking to fuse explicit video imagery with real-life tactile sensation.

Brad Abram, president of XStream3D Multimedia, said his firm’s “Virtually Jenna,” an online game in which the player has sex with realistic cartoon of porn star Jenna Jameson, can link hardware devices following the action to genitalia.

“None of the big publishers will probably venture in there so we could be like the Hustler or the Playboy or whatever, the Penthouse of adult gaming,” the Vancouver, Canada-based Abram said. “Sex toys is a huge business.”

His service, without the hardware, costs $29.95 a month, and he said several hundred thousand people have tried the online sex game to date. He expects the hardware area of such simulations to grow rapidly.

…

ALL IN THE MIND

Going even a level further, other researchers say in decades to come advanced devices will be able to stimulate the brain to create a sexual experience without manipulating genitalia.

Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the study of artificial intelligence dating back to 1951, said such devices could either trigger an actual physical response from the brain, or have the entire experience take place in the mind with the sensation of sex — but without the mess or risk of sexually transmitted disease.

“It’s bound to happen … and is not as far off as some people think,” Minsky, a professor emeritus at MIT, said of direct brain manipulation. “They are doing things with monkeys but it is not a big world-class industry yet, so that could take 20-30 years.”

“But if the game (industry) people got involved in some underdeveloped country that didn’t have any laws against it, it could all happen twice as fast.”

Lewis and Clark go to Mars

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I grew up just a few miles from where Lewis and Clark went through Idaho on their way to and from the Pacific Ocean.  Lewis and Clark were a prominent feature in Idaho History taught in the eight grade.  I have listened to books on tapes about them and Barb and I have stopped at lots of historical landmarks and a few museums along the Lewis and Clark trail in Montana and Idaho.  It was an amazing journey with only one man lost, probably due to an appendicitis rupture, through hostile native American country (the Sioux in particular) as well as incredibly friendly native Americans (the Nez Perce as well as others), starvation as well as an excess of food, and dangerous animals (read about their experience with grizzly bears!).  Thomas Jefferson made an excellent choice in Meriwether Lewis for the leader of the journey but screwed up in the handling of his return.  Lewis probably should have been sent back out on another trip rather than being given a desk job as a governor.  Lewis ended up committing suicide just a couple years after returning from his historic trip.

I’m reminded of all this by the following from the Washington Post:

“What we have ahead of us represents a challenge significantly greater than when we first went to the moon,” Griffin said recently in a speech.

New classes of astronauts will have to practice flying in a vehicle quite different from the shuttle and learn how to extract resources such as oxygen from the moon’s soil. They will be taught to grow vegetables in lunar greenhouses and conduct geological tests on the moon’s surface. Already, engineers at United Space Alliance are studying how a crew will be able to train aboard the spacecraft on a three-year trip to Mars. Eventually, Mars-bound astronauts will have to learn how to extract fuel and other resources from Mars’ surface.

“The requirement to live off the land will be crucial to our future in space, just as it was to Lewis and Clark,” Griffin said recently.

There will be some crucial differences in the journey to Mars versus to the Pacific Ocean via the Missouri and Columbia rivers.  In some ways we know a lot more about what is between Earth and Mars than the men of Lewis and Clark’s expedition knew before their trip.  But then L&C could turn around and come back at almost any time if the going got too rough.  They never had to worry about where their next breath of fresh air was going to be found, water was never a problem, and food was only rarely a problem.  Even when they were at their most distance point from their origin, the mouth of the Columbia, they could have just waited for the next ship to stop in and pay for a ride home.  Mars explorers will face larger challenges but will probably have to do less “thinking on their feet”.  The brain power of thousands of support staff on earth will be only a few minutes away as long as their radios work.

I wish them luck and wish I could go with them.  James and I, as well as other friends, have often fantasized about starting over someplace other than Earth.  If it were up to us we would create a new place to live where the rules were extraordinary few and the freedoms vast.  A place where the Bill of Rights were adhered to rather than ignored.  Where government was truly limited to the most minimal amount absolutely required.  Where free markets and free ideas were something to be celebrated rather than repressed. 

This isn’t off topic, so stay with me for a moment–James sent me an email yesterday saying:

Ok, Meredith is insisting that I read some Heinlein.  Not reading him is apparently a great offense.  She’s got where I should start narrowed down to The Past Through Tomorrow, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  So I’m cross-referencing them by you to see what you think I should read first.  Thanks.

I have been trying to get him to read Heinlein for about 15 years now.  I saved all my Heinlein books for my children hoping they would enjoy them as much as I did.  No luck.  None of my kids would read more than a chapter or two before getting bored.  Now James is almost 22 years old and “Meredith” has more influence over him than his father ever did.  I’m a little bit envious but I like this “Meredith” already and I have never met her or had any contact with her.  Just a few things James has told us about her.  Heinlein had a huge influence on me and my personal philosophy.   My recommendation to James from that short list of Heinlein books?  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  It’s unlikely I will live to see the revolution as envisioned by Heinlein in this book but the dream that my children may live to see it or something similar and enjoy the fruits of it please me.  Freedom is embedded in the spirit of humans and repression of that is only a short term accomplishment.   Thank you Meredith for helping me to keep James on track.

The meaning of WiFi

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Thanks to this pointer from Raymond I can now stop stressing on why it’s called WiFi.  The “Wireless Fidelity” answer just didn’t sit well with me but I never bother to go searching for a better answer or rub someone’s nose in the obvious nonsense name.  Cory Doctorow gives us the real story.  WiFi isn’t short for anything.  I feel so much better now.  Thank you.

After guns are banned knives will be next

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Could you imagine the laughter that would result if people claimed the slippery slope of gun control would result in banned knives?  A political world where “assault weapon” bans include not just pistol grips, folding stocks, and bayonet lugs but kitchen knives is just ridiculous, right?  Wrong.  Check out what is happening in the U.K.:

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

…

The study found links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established.

French laws in the 17th century decreed that the tips of table and street knives be ground smooth.

A century later, forks and blunt-ended table knives were introduced in the UK in an effort to reduce injuries during arguments in public eating houses.

The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime.

“The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime.”

“We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect.”

…

Home Office spokesperson said there were already extensive restrictions in place to control the sale and possession of knives.

“The law already prohibits the possession of offensive weapons in a public place, and the possession of knives in public without good reason or lawful authority, with the exception of a folding pocket knife with a blade not exceeding three inches.”

“Offensive weapons are defined as any weapon designed or adapted to cause injury, or intended by the person possessing them to do so.”

“An individual has to demonstrate that he had good reason to possess a knife, for example for fishing, other sporting purposes or as part of his profession (e.g. a chef) in a public place.”

“The manufacture, sale and importation of 17 bladed, pointed and other offensive weapons have been banned, in addition to flick knives and gravity knives.”

I’m having difficulty modeling what is going on in these peoples minds.  Making a knife is not like building a Pentium 4 integrated circuit.  You can’t shut down a few factories and expect knifes to disappear from the hands of people.  How long have people been making knives?  Something on the order a million (or two) years, right?  Do these people believe the technology for knife making can be restricted?  Do they believe if they ban knives people will stop making them?

The best model I can come up with that there is some sort of mass insanity that has taken hold of these people.  We’ve long known that anti-gun people have mental problems.  When these people have achieved their goals of banning guns the mental problems don’t go away–they merely find a new obsession and knives are the most visible target.

Easiest interview question

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Yesterday I arrived at 8:45 and left at 17:40.  Nearly nine hours interviewing for a new job.  I’m not sure how many people I talked to.  In my mind they merged into a blur of coding tests on the white-board.  “Write your own version of malloc() and free().”  “Implement a function that converts a ASCII string into a floating point number.”  “Reverse the order of the words in a string.  Do it in place–without allocating more memory.”  “Find the first unique character in a string.”  “Write the test cases for your code.”  “What is the big O of your solution?  Can you do it better?”  Those are just the ones I remember.  My right arm went weak from writing on the white-board for so many hours.  I remember the easiest question though.  “What gets you up in the morning?”  “My wife”, I answered.

Update: I’ve been getting calls and email asking how it went.  It went well.  Only the smallest of glitches.  The 8.5 hours of interviews with eight different people today in a different group was generally easier except for one technical question that I severely crashed and burned on. 

And the toughest question yesterday?  “Show me a cure for spam email.  You have 45 minutes.”