cynwoody
Joined 15 years ago
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Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
"Encrypted" is too strong a word. But the code talkers needed a way to represent English that didn't have a natural Navajo equivalent.
So they developed a vocabulary of 411 Navajo words to stand for common military terms. E.g., BESH-LO, which is Navajo for "iron fish", meant "submarine".
The vocabulary included a phonetic alphabet to represent the 26 English letters. E.g., the three Navajo words MOASI, TLA-GIN, and BA-GOSHI all represent English words beginning with C (cat, coal, cow). So, they could spell out arbitrary English words not in their vocabulary.
It was secure against an enemy that lacked Navajos and probably didn't even know what language was being spoken or if they were intercepting some weird form of audio scrambling. But, if the Japanese had been able to translate the messages to English, the code would probably not have survived cryptanalysis for long.
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-th...
Comment · 3 years ago
> But as I said, things are changing. So far we're moving the "backend" stuff to .Net/C#.
Delphi and C# share a chief architect, Anders Hejlsberg, who left Borland for Microsoft in 1996[0].
Comment · 3 years ago
Yes, Tom Scott is one talented YouTuber.
See, for example, his video on microwaving frozen hamsters back to life[0], in which he interviews the 101-year-old J. E. Lovelock, the scientist who did the work back in the fifties.
Comment · 3 years ago
Right below the author's comment, "Regardless of a grid’s size, the current flowing through it oscillates in perfect synchrony, at exactly the same frequency, throughout the whole grid," he presents a map of Western Europe's regional groups. I notice that Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland comprise the Nordic Regional Group.
Iceland? There is a lot of water between Iceland and the other three nations in its group. Is Iceland's power indeed synchronized with the other three? If so, why does it need to be?
Below the map, the author includes a link crediting the Wikipedia article on power grids[0], which includes maps of other regions in the world.
Perusing the map for North America, I notice another noncontiguous regional group, namely the Alaska group. Most of Alaska is off the grid (or, more accurately, on a collection of local grids too small to be named). The named group includes a slice of the interior extending northward from Anchorage towards Fairbanks and a separate noncontiguous area containing Juneau. I have the same question, are the two sub-regions synchronized?
Comment · 3 years ago
It's not useful for mag tape or wire recordings, but archaeologists have available a technique that can date artifacts like campfires, pottery kilns, and burned out adobe houses within the last 10,000 years.
It's called archaeomagnetic dating[0]. It turns out that heated ferromagnetic materials, such as magnetite, capture the magnitude and direction of the earth's magnetic field as they cool down through the Curie temperature[1]. That allows an investigator to ascertain the direction of magnetic north the last time a likely sample was heated above the Curie point. Over time, magnetic north changes with respect to true north.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleomagnetism
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperatureComment · 3 years ago
Apparently, as the GP points out, the article author meant to write asterisk where he wrote plus.
uint16(50_000) * uint16(50_000) is uint32(2_500_000_000), which turns out to be int32(-1_794_967_296), the garbage result the author cites.
Comment · 4 years ago
The Library of Congress claims† to host 21 petabytes of digital content. That would take†† a little over a minute and a half to send over the link described in the article, assuming, of course, that the content has been put in a ready-to-send form.
†https://www.loc.gov/programs/digital-collections-management/....
††https://www.google.com/search?q=21+petabytes+%2F+1.84+petabi...
Comment · 4 years ago
From 1897 to 1953, New York City operated a pneumatic tube mail transport system. It consisted of 27 miles of tubing connecting 23 post offices and carried 95,000 letters per day, amounting to 30% of the city's mail volume. The canisters were two feet long and eight inches in diameter and could carry 600 letters.[1]
Jams were a bear. Crews would travel the route of the tube and check air pressure at test points every two blocks where the tube surfaced. When they found a drop in pressure at a test point, they would try to free the stuck canister by injecting extra pressure. If that failed, they would have to dig up the street.[2]
In the early 2000s, parts of the network were repurposed to run fiber optic cable.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor... [2]https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01870447/document
Comment · 5 years ago
The Russian site also appears wide open. Example:
https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20pa...
Comment · 6 years ago
In the US, we have ZIP+4, which appends an additional four digits to the five-digit ZIP code. It's mainly used by bulk mailers, as part of qualifying for reduced postage rates.
Like the British postcode, important addresses have their own ZIP+4. E.g., 20500-0001, 20500-0002, and 20500-0003 refer, respectively, to the President, the First Lady, and the White House in general.
Comment · 6 years ago
I just do ZZ, if I want to save the buffer, or ZQ if I was just looking, or I messed up (I'm a vim newbie).
Comment · 7 years ago
> It's already absolutely impossible to send someone a link to a pdf you've found through google, this would make it impossible to send any link.
Do you have an example of that behavior?
I wanted to know "what is a lure in counterintelligence?". Here is a link to the second search result, which happens to be a PDF:
https://fas.org/irp/eprint/ci-glossary.pdf
For the answer to the query, search for "dangle" in the PDF.
Comment · 7 years ago
A few years ago, the IRS came after Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, now the PM, for taxes on the gain from the sale of his house in London. He was born in NYC, you see, making him an American citizen. He ended up paying the tax and renouncing his US citizenship.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2015/02/15/savvy-lon...
Comment · 7 years ago
Voting does work with JS disabled, just not well.
The page reloads and re-renders with the UI changes (up-down buttons hidden and unvote link added). However, the reload takes noticeable time, and you lose your scroll location, which is disorienting.
With JS enabled, the UI changes happen instantly, and the scroll position doesn't change. The page still reloads, but the reload is directed into a new Image object which is immediately garbage, so it's off the UI timeline. But it's inexplicable bandwidth waste, nonetheless!
Satellites such as Starlink operate in low earth orbit at about 350 miles, significantly above the F-layer. Also, they introduce repeater delay when they relay a data packet. To get from Chicago to Frankfurt would require relaying the packet thru multiple satellites. So, greater distance (even if passed by laser between satellites) plus repeater delays.
Also note that satellites in LEO are the only option. Geosynchronous satellites are completely out of the game due to the much greater distances involved.
Radio ham blog post discussing HF propagation: