GPG Vim: Decrypt and edit on the fly
I have a file on my computer filled with all sorts of interesting personal data, such as usernames and passwords, bank account and credit card numbers, and keys to the non-Free software I’ve purchased. I’ve encrypted it to my GPG key, and keep it in my SVN repository. When I want to add something new to the file, I have to decrypt it to a plaintext file, edit it, and re-encrypt it before committing it back to subversion. Taking a page out of Cryptonomicon (one of the best books ever written), I just discovered a nifty plugin for Vim, my editor of choice, that turns off swap files (and other un-secure things) and automatically decrypts and encrypts files ending in .gpg. Still vulnerable to cross-process memory inspection, I suppose, but this is better than nothing, saves me time, and prevents sensitive bits from ever going onto the hard drive, where they are pretty difficult to get rid of.
Installation is as easy as dropping the downloaded file into ~/.vim/plugin/
Quorum Sensing
Quorum sensing is a type of decision-making process used by decentralized groups to coordinate behavior. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate their gene expression according to the local density of their population. Similarly, some social insects use quorum sensing to make collective decisions about where to nest. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics.
Quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system, as long as individual components have (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected.
One totally awesome example of quorum sensing:
Colonies of the ant Temnothorax albipennis nest in small crevices between rocks. When the rocks shift and the nest is broken open, these ants must quickly choose a new nest to move into. During the first phase of the decision-making process, a small portion of the workers leave the destroyed nest and search for new crevices. When one of these scout ants finds a potential nest, she assesses the quality of the crevice based on a variety of factors including the size of the interior, the number of openings (based on light level), and the presence or absence of dead ants. The worker then returns to the destroyed nest, where she will wait for a short period before recruiting other workers to follow her to the nest she found using a process called tandem running. The waiting period is inversely related to the quality of the site; for instance, a worker that has found a poor site will wait longer than a worker that encountered a good site. As the new recruits visit the potential nest site and make their own assessment of its quality, the number of ants visiting the crevice increases. During this stage ants may be visiting many different potential nests. However, because of the differences in the waiting period the number of ants in the best nest will tend to increase at the greatest rate. Eventually, the ants in this nest will sense that the rate at which they encounter other ants has exceeded a particular threshold, indicating that the quorum number has been reached. Once the ants sense a quorum, they return to the destroyed nest and begin rapidly carrying the brood, queen, and fellow workers to the new nest. Scouts that are still tandem-running to other potential sites are also recruited to the new nest and the entire colony moves. Thus although no single worker may have visited and compared all of the available options, quorum sensing enables the colony as a whole to quickly make good decisions about where to move.
Tryptophan, Bringer of Sleep
Now that you’ve consumed your immense thanksgiving dinner, sit back and have a nap, thanks to your friendly amino acid Tryptophan:
Tryptophan (abbreviated as Trp or W) is one of the 20 standard amino acids, as well as an essential amino acid in the human diet. It is encoded in genetic code as the codon UGG. Only the L-stereoisomer of tryptophan is used in structural or enzyme proteins, but the D-stereoisomer is occasionally found in naturally produced peptides (for example, the marine venom peptide contryphan). The distinguishing structural characteristic of tryptophan is that it contains an indole functional group.
One widely-held belief is that heavy consumption of turkey meat (as for example in a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast) results in drowsiness, which has been attributed to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey. While turkey does contain high levels of tryptophan, the amount is comparable to that contained in most other meats. Furthermore, postprandial Thanksgiving sedation may have more to do with what is consumed along with the turkey, in particular carbohydrates and alcohol, rather than the turkey itself. This is demonstrated in a popular episode of the sitcom “Seinfeld” when characters of the show drug a woman using turkey and alcohol in order to play with her toy collection.
It has been demonstrated in both animal models and in humans that ingestion of a meal rich in carbohydrates triggers release of insulin. Insulin in turn stimulates the uptake of large neutral branched-chain amino acids (LNAA) but not tryptophan (trp) into muscle, increasing the ratio of trp to LNAA in the blood stream. The resulting increased ratio of tryptophan to large neutral amino acids in the blood reduces competition at the large neutral amino acid transporter resulting in the uptake of tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier into the central nervous system (CNS). Once inside the CNS, tryptophan is converted into serotonin in the raphe nuclei by the normal enzymatic pathway. The resultant serotonin is further metabolised into melatonin by the pineal gland. Hence, these data suggest that “feast-induced drowsiness,” and in particular, the common post-Christmas and American post-Thanksgiving dinner drowsiness, may be the result of a heavy meal rich in carbohydrates which, via an indirect mechanism, increases the production of sleep-promoting melatonin in the brain.
Turducken
A 30 lb Turducken. ‘Merica!
A Turducken is a dish consisting of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The thoracic cavity of the chicken and the rest of the gaps are filled with, at the very least, a highly seasoned breadcrumb mixture or sausage meat, although some versions have a different stuffing for each bird.
The result is a relatively solid, albeit layered, piece of poultry, suitable for cooking by braising, roasting, grilling, or barbecuing. The turducken is not suitable for deep frying Cajun style (to deep fry poultry, the body cavity must be hollow to cook evenly).
Some people credit Cajun-creole fusion chef Paul Prudhomme with creating the commercial dish as part of the festival Duvall Days in Duvall, Wa in 1983. However, no one has ever verified this claim. The November 2005 issue of National Geographic magazine in an article by Calvin Trillin traced the American origins of the dish to Maurice, Louisiana, and “Hebert’s Specialty Meats”, which has been commercially producing turduckens since 1985, when a local farmer whose name is unknown, brought in his own birds and asked Hebert’s to prepare them in the now-familiar style. The company prepares around 5,000 turduckens per week around Thanksgiving time. They share a friendly rivalry with Paul Prudhomme.
Turducken is often associated with the “do-it-yourself” outdoor food culture also associated with barbecueing and shrimp boils, although some people now serve it in place of the traditional roasted turkey at the Thanksgiving meal. Turduckens can be prepared at home by anybody willing to learn how to remove the bones from poultry, instructions for which can be found on the Internet or in various cookbooks. As their popularity has spread from Louisiana to the rest of the Deep South and beyond, they are also available through some specialty stores in urban areas, or even by mail order.
While popular in the United States, they are rarely seen anywhere else in the world.
The largest recorded nested bird roast is 17 birds, attributed to a royal feast in France in the early 19th century (originally called a Rôti Sans Pareil, or “Roast without equal”) - a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an Ortolan Bunting and a Garden Warbler. The final bird is small enough that it can be stuffed with a single olive; it also suggests that, unlike modern multi-bird roasts, there was no stuffing or other packing placed in between the birds. This dish probably could not be legally recreated in the modern era as many of the listed birds are now protected species.
Amusing list of archetypal stories
The Strange Horizons web-magazine has an amusing list of “Stories We’ve Seen Too Often”. Here are a few excerpts:
3. Visitor to alien planet ignores information about local rules, inadvertantly violates them, is punished.
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8. A place is described, with no plot or characters.
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21. People whose politics are different from the author’s are shown to be stupid, insane, or evil, usually through satire, sarcasm, stereotyping, and wild exaggeration.
A. In the future, the US or the world is ruled by politically correct liberals, leading to awful things (usually including loss of freedom of speech).
B. In the future, the US or the world is ruled by fascist conservatives, leading to awful things (usually including loss of freedom of speech).
Strange Horizons Fiction Department: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often
Mariel Boatlift
As mentioned in Scarface…
The Mariel Boat Lift was a mass movement of Cubans who departed from Cuba’s Mariel Harbor for the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980.
The boatlift was precipitated by a sharp downturn in the Cuban economy, leading to simmering internal tensions on the island and a bid by up to 10,000 Cubans to gain asylum in the Peruvian embassy.
The Cuban government subsequently announced that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, and an impromptu exodus organized by Cuban-Americans with the agreement of Cuban President Fidel Castro was underway. The boatlift began to have negative political implications for U.S. President Jimmy Carter when it was discovered that a number of the exiles had been released from Cuban jails and mental health facilities. The exodus was ended by mutual agreement between the two governments in October 1980. By that time up to 125,000 Cubans had made the journey to Florida.
Haberdasher
A haberdasher is a person who sells small articles for sewing, such as buttons, ribbons and zippers. In U.S. English, haberdasher is another term for a men’s outfitter.
A haberdasher’s shop or the items sold therein are called haberdashery.
Obsolete meanings of the term “haberdasher” refer to a “dealer in, or maker of, hats and caps”.
The word appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Haberdashers were initially pedlars, sellers of small wares, such as needles, buttons, etc. The word could derive from the Icelandic haprtask ‘pedlars’ wares’ or the sack in which the pedlar carries them. In this sense, a haberdasher Scandinavian name would be very close to a mercer French name. A haberdasher would retail smallwares, the goods of the pedlar, while a mercer would specialize in “linens, silks, fustian, worsted piece-goods and bedding”.
Saint Louis IX, the King of France 1226–70, is supposedly the patron saint of haberdashers.
Hi-pot
Hipot is an abbreviation for high potential. Traditionally, Hipot is a term given to a class of electrical safety testing instruments used to verify electrical insulation in finished appliances, cables or other wired assemblies, printed circuit boards, electric motors, and transformers.
Under normal conditions, any electrical device will produce a minimal amount of leakage current due to the voltages and internal capacitance present within the product. Yet due to design flaws or other factors, the insulation in a product can break down, resulting in excessive leakage current flow. This failure condition can cause shock or death to anyone that comes into contact with the faulty product.
A Hipot test (also called a Dielectric Withstand test) verifies that the insulation of a product or component is sufficient to protect the operator from electrical shock. In a typical Hipot test, high voltage is applied between a product’s current-carrying conductors and its metallic chassis. The resulting current that flows through the insulation, known as leakage current, is monitored by the hipot tester. The theory behind the test is that if a deliberate over-application of test voltage does not cause the insulation to break down, the product will be safe to use under normal operating conditions — hence the name, Dielectric Withstand test.
In addition to over-stressing the insulation, the test can also be performed to detect material and workmanship defects, most importantly small gap spacings between current-carrying conductors and earth ground. When a product is operated under normal conditions, environmental factors such as humidity, dirt, vibration, shock and contaminants can close these small gaps and allow current to flow. This condition can create a shock hazard if the defects are not corrected at the factory. No other test can uncover this type of defect as well as the Dielectric Withstand test.
Mythbusters Interview
MAKE Magazine’s Patti Schiendelman recently sat down with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman of the totally awesome show Mythbusters for a two part interview. These two are quite intelligent, and are doing a great service to the citizens of the world by bringing the scientific method into their homes and making everyday people excited about science and experimentation.
A good excerpt from Jamie Hyneman:
In particular, the thing that I’ve realized, especially recently - people talk about the impact of the Internet, and I’m sure different people use it, obviously, differently, but for me, it’s just absolutely fantastic because I have no end of questions and I can answer those questions almost instantly. Obviously a lot of it’s crap that you’re going to run across; if you learn how to filter it, you’re better off. I was halfway through my master’s in Library Science, had a degree in Russian Language and Literature before that, I was already really into Information Science, way before Mythbusters, before getting anywhere near where I am now. But the Internet - I think of it as something that’s practically mind-altering. The amount of power that you have for advancement and development of technology - I don’t think we’ve really seen the impact of it quite yet - people may not realize the potential of it. But when one learns how to really use the Internet, it’s like you’ve multiplied your intelligence, your abilities by huge factors.