A cool new channel called "Geek and Sundry"

Most of the time here at Chimp we discuss weighty, important subjects like particle physics, dark nets and grizzled langurs.  But then sometimes we just try to spread the word about cool stuff.

During a recent board game fest, my friends had me laughing so much I said we should record our games and post them online so people could howl at our comments.  That's probably not going to happen, but here's something even better--a new YouTube channel called "Geek and Sundry."

Geek and Sundry is building an interesting lineup of web shows, including Tabletop, wherein Wil Wheaton plays board games with people (and crushes their hopes of winning.)  Other shows include The Guild (a comedy now in its fifth season), Sword and Laser (a Science Fiction and Fantasy book club), and more.  A particularly intriguing show is Dark Horse Motion Comics, which apparently animates Dark Horse comic book favorites like Hellboy and the BPRD.

With tech-savvy folks like Felicia Day and Veronica Belmont creating its content, I expect Geek and Sundry will be a lot of fun when it begins airing Sunday, 1 April.

What is Probability?

This weekend my friends and I played a board game called Stone Age, where you hunt, collect resources and construct buildings.  During the game, a player drew a card that called for rolling dice to determine what resources we'd get.  He wanted to roll a '6' because that meant he'd get a valuable farm, and so we talked about the odds of rolling a '6' with four dice.

This leads us to probability.  Probability is simply the measure of how likely something is to happen.  It can be a small thing, like the flip of a coin, or something big, like the likelihood you'll get into a car wreck. 

A probability can be expressed as a fraction between 0 and 1, or as a percentage of 0% to 100%.  In our daily lives, we may not take the time to write down the exact fractions or percentages, but we make educated guesses all the time.

If you're choosing what route to take home from work and you know it's the Friday before a three-day weekend, you'll predict what highways or bridges will be jammed, and then choose a different road.  If you're in an office pool for the NCAA basketball tournament, you'll figure some rough probabilities in your head as you pick your bracket winners.

We do this stuff all the time, so we shouldn't let the math part scare us.

Since the 1500s, mathematicians and gamblers have studied probability.  Famous thinkers like Fermat and Pascal examined this topic, and there has long been a connection between betting and math.  Even the phrase "games of chance" tells us they involve probability.  One of the early papers on probability, titled "Doctrine of Chances" by DeMoivre, contained problems which calculated the odds of winning lottery tickets.

One odd branch of this area is actuarial science, where insurance actuaries use math and statistics to make probability predictions about all sorts of things, including death.  An early example of this is the London Life Table created by John Graunt in the 1600s.  Graunt used the lifespans of 100 people in the city and noted how long they lived, which provided useful data about the appalling mortality rate among children of that era.

If you're curious how many more years you may live, follow this link to a Social Security chart.  The chart does not take into account where you live, or if you're in a dangerous occupation, etc., so it is quite broad.  But you can look at your gender, figure out what age you were in 2007 (when the chart was made), and then look at the column labeled "Life Expectancy" and see how many more years you may live.  It is sobering. 

And a reminder that you should use well the days you have on this Earth.  

(Sources include:  Education World, an article by Amy Troutman at Wichita.edu, and Social Security Online.  The pic is from Google Images.)

John Singer Sargent, An Artist Who Stood His Ground

The other night I was reading a Jack Higgins thriller--The Judas Gate--and one of the characters in the story is a portrait painter.  It got me thinking about portraits and wondering if portrait painters still exist.  But now and then in a bank or a corporate office or a state capital you'll send an actual portrait painting, so such artists must be available.

When I think of portraits, I think of one of the best painters of that type, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).  Sargent was American, but born in Florence, Italy, and he seemed to spend much of his adult life moving around Europe and the United States.  Like people in many professions, he went where the work was.  He studied in Germany, Italy and France, spending four years in Paris with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran. 

Some critics dismiss Sargent's work as too commercial.  After all, he received commissions to paint pictures of rich people and politicians, including two presidents.  (Example above is of Lady Agnew)  However, I find this a narrow view.  Sargent not only painted portraits, but landscapes and watercolors, too.  Also, Sargent was not content with art as a hobby--he was a professional and he wished to earn his living as artist.  In those days, painting a portrait was a good way to improve his skills while also making money to eat.  And when shown to the public, the paintings were excellent advertisements for his business.

In the early 1880s, Sargent painted three full-length portraits of women that received good reviews and his career was taking off.  But in 1884, at the age of 28, he painted Madame Gautreau in Paris.  The painting was exhibited as Madame X, and it caused a storm of negative opinion because people thought it was too sensual.  Demands were made that he alter the painting, or remove it, and even his friends worried that his career would be ruined, but Sargent stood his ground.  He refused to take the painting down.

By today's standards, Madame X (seen above) is quite tame.  But at the time, Sargent was a young artist with his whole career on the line.  However, he clung to what he believed in.  He believed in the beauty and value of his own work, and he would not bow to popular opinion or pressure. 

It cost him.  Wealthy patrons in France stopped hiring him for commissions, and his money situation grew so bad he couldn't afford paint supplies.  Eventually, he moved to England and had to start over again.  Fortunately, he did find work and his career resumed.  Sargent made many trips to the United States, and during World War 1 visited the war zone in France, resulting in a haunting painting of soldiers blinded by mustard gas.  In 1925, he died of a heart attack while home in bed.

After his death, some critics complained about him working for the rich on portraits designed to impress the middle class.  They ignore the fact that Sargent stood firm in the face of public displeasure, even though it hurt him financially.  I believe he showed moral courage, something which is often absent from business decisions made in the public eye.  Equally important, he continued to practice his craft, pushing himself to improve and to try new things even late in life.

And that's a pretty good example for all of us.

(The following sources were helpful:  JohnSingerSargent.org, Artcyclopedia, Spartacus Educational, and Ray Carney's American Painting.  The images :  top is Lady Agnew from National Galleries, middle is Madame X from Harpers Bazaar, bottom is Gassed from Spartacus Educational.)

What is a Darknet?

Now and then I see the term 'Darknet' online, and you've probably seen it, too.  So what is a Darknet? Well, it depends on who you ask.

There are several terms bouncing around the Internet:  Dark Web, Deep Web, Deep Net, and Darknet.  Oh, and Anonymous Networks.  It gets confusing.  This post will simply address Darknets and Anonymous Networks, and save the remaining terms for another day.

Let's start with how the Internet normally works.  You want to visit a website, so your computer sends a request in the form of data packets.  Each packet is addressed with where it came from (your computer) and where it's going (the site you want to visit).  When a data packet reaches a web server, it looks at the address, and passes it along to the next server until it reaches its destination. 

Your IP address, which is the key to your location and identity, remains known because there is a clear trail from your computer to its destination.

In 2002, four Microsoft employees wrote a paper titled, "The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution."  Their angle was that protecting copyrighted material like music with DRM (Digital Rights Management) would be difficult if people resorted to file sharing on their own private Darknets.

Darknets are decentralized, non-commercial, private networks that function using P2P (peer to peer) or F2F (friend to friend) protocols. 

What does that mean? A Darknet is where people go to anonymously share files.

Popular Torrent-style sites that share music and games may not be true darknets because they are not between trusted peers, but instead let any user connect with any other.

However, even Darknets are not truly anonymous because your Internet Service Provider can inspect your data packets if they think you're sending spam or pirating games or something nefarious.  To counter this, some users move to Anonymous Networks like Tor and i2p, which use 'onion routing.'

Onion routing places layers of encryption around your data packet, and as the packet moves from router to router, a layer of encryption is peeled away.  By the time it reaches its destination, that web server can only see the last place the packet came from, not its original location (your computer).

Like any technology, Darknets and Anonymous Networks can be used for good or evil.  Credit card thieves, child pornographers, and pirates can use them to sell or trade files.  However, citizens of oppressive regimes like Syria, Iran or China can use them to communicate and organize with less fear of being arrested.

I didn't find data on how many Darknets are in use or how many people use them, but I think they are here to stay.  People want online anonymity for a variety of reasons, and that is motivation enough to keep building new Darknets every day.

(I drew information from WitnessThis (especially the Comments section), Null Byte and Wikipedia.  The pic is from:  Vagabondish)

Sunspots, Solar Flares and the threat to Earth

This week we have a guest post from Torger Reppen.  Please enjoy.

* * *
From Space Watch:

January 19, 2012 - CHANCE OF AURORAS: NOAA forecasters estimate a 15% to 20% chance of polar geomagnetic storms during the next 24 hours in response to a possible glancing blow from a CME (coronal mass ejection.)  High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.  Earth's atmosphere has been puffing up in response to increasing levels of UV radiation from sunspots. This is good news for satellite operators, because a puffed up atmosphere helps clean up low-Earth orbit. Meanwhile, sunspot 1401 poses a threat for some M-class solar flares.

* * *

I read the information above on January 19th.  I didn't quite understand it all but I found it extremely interesting.  An event as large as the one described above is not rare, occurring perhaps a few times a year.

The sun has solar storms much like the gaseous planets have regular storms, and these storms are often called sunspots.  Sunspots produce incredible amounts of energy and are as bright as a welder's arc, but appear dark compared to the rest of the Sun.  Sunspots sometimes cause solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME).

Solar flares are like the Balrog's flaming whip (from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings) grounded in the internal layers of the sun, and they exert some ionic and magnetic influence on our   atmosphere, whereas CMEs fling huge hunks of plasma into space.  This plasma can be very large and hit several planets at the same time.  Some scientists estimate the CME event on January 19th may have ripped away 2-5% of Mercury's atmosphere.

So a big piece of plasma may be hurling towards Earth while I'm watching sitcoms--completely unaware that the human race will be fried any minute.  Not looking good for the last of the Miller's grizzled langurs either.   Fortunately, our magnetosphere repels most of it and channels a tiny bit of it to the polar regions, causing aurora borealis.

But I was perplexed by the sentence, "This is good news for satellite operators, because a puffed up atmosphere helps clean up low-Earth orbit."  So many questions in that one sentence.  I thought this was bad bad bad for satellites.  And it is, for a few minutes or hours.

In 2007 China used an old satellite as a missile target, and created 3,000 pieces of space junk large enough to be tracked.  The satellite was orbiting more than 500 miles out, and the debris that settled into orbit went everywhere from 100 miles up to farther out.  The International Space Station is around 220 miles out.  This debris is really bad for every nation that has satellites.  In ten seconds, China increased the amount of space junk by 15%.

So space debris is bad for satellites because it can wreck them if they collide, and the debris lasts not just for a few minutes but for years or decades or possibly forever.  But when the Sun's CME plasma hits the thermosphere (which is almost pure space, but has a few molecules) it heats up.  This causes expansion from its usual 50 to 300 mile range out to a 50 to 500 mile range.

The increased range of this extremely thin atmosphere is enough to slow down many pieces of debris enough that they now have a decaying orbit and spiral down into Earth.  Interestingly, one article I read stated that they generally aren't going fast enough to burn up like a meteor. At any rate, the atmosphere puffs up and "grabs" some space debris, thereby cleaning an orbital area of space that is popular for satellites.

A bit more about our ever vigilant and protective Mother Earth; Earth has a magnetic field. It is quite strong and deflects nearly everything. It is likely impossible for life to thrive on Earth without it because we would be subjected to far greater radiation and our atmosphere would be ripped away from time to time due to solar CMEs.

Mercury has a weak magnetic field, so if a large CME hits this planet it may scour the planet's surface.  Geologic evidence in Martian rocks show that Mars used to have a magnetic field.  No one knows why the magnetic field on Mars went away.  Also, more and more evidence points to the position that Mars actually had a much denser atmosphere a billion years ago, complete with huge oceans.  Without a magnetosphere the atmosphere would be eventually be stripped away due to solar activity.  Mars currently has an atmosphere about 1/200th the density of ours.  Earth is a special place.

* * *
(Sources include:  The Extinction Protocol, Astronomy News and Updates, and NASA.)  

(The picture is from:  NASA SolarDynamics Observatory)

Hacking for Money

Hacking has changed.  It used to be a college kid who liked to explore networks late at night, sitting in his dorm room at his computer, sipping Mountain Dew.  Or maybe a thief trying to steal credit card numbers--a criminal, but not a violent, gun-toting criminal.

That has changed.  Consider the new term in use:  Advanced Persistent Threats.  That's what they call it now.  Instead of independent actors, hackers have become employees of governments, corporations and criminal syndicates.

Hacking has gone from being a tool of exploration to a weapon of choice.  It is flexible and provides those who engage in it with plausible deniability.  In this weaponized version, hacking can steal intellectual property and technology for economic or military gain, sabotage enemy infrastructure and crush internal dissent.

An article by Adam Piore in the January issue of Popular Mechanics provides some good examples of these variations.  In 2011, a cyber attack on Japan's Mitsubishi corporation targeted both military data about submarines and missiles, and civilian data on nuclear power plants.  After an investigation, Japan concluded that China was behind the attack.

Back in June of 2010, Iran's nuclear program discovered its computers were infected with the Stuxnet worm, a type of malware which loads faulty code into the system.  Because the United States and Israel have openly opposed Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, they were the main suspects in the sabotage.

One of the scariest applications of hacking is for political oppression.  Iranian hackers invaded the Dutch company DigiNotar and used the data to intercept and identify 300,000 Gmail users in Iran.  In a tightly controlled regime like Iran, opposition parties use email and social networks to communicate, so this type of hacking poses a direct threat to their safety.

In addition to all these, criminal hacking has expanded into well-funded groups using very clever methods.  But according to Piore's article, the most aggressive hackers are countries, especially China, Russia and Israel.

As an online individual, you're probably not of interest to anyone other than identity thieves and spammers (and advertisers and your own government.)  But if you work in any industry related to military technology, computer services, telecommunication or infrastructure like water and electricity, you may find yourself targeted through social network messages and email containing bait links that will load malicious software onto your home or work computer.  So think carefully before you click that next link.

(The pic is of a Venus Flytrap trying to eat a frog and is from www.animalseatinganimals.com)

Liars and Outliers: Thoughts and Conclusions

In a previous post, we looked at the first half of Bruce Schneier's interesting book.  To recap, Liar and Outliers examines how trust mechanisms work, whether you're ordering products online from people you've never met, or you're paying a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn. In order for commerce to function, there must be a certain level of trust.

The second half of the book deals with Organizations, Corporations and Institutions and how their competing interests work out in real world situations.  A model often used in the book is that of fishing.  Overfishing will deplete the stock and eventually ruin the industry, so most individuals and companies don't engage in it.  However, 'defectors' may overfish because of the short term benefits and the low risk of getting caught.

The fourth and final section explains how societal pressures to act trustworthy can fail, and how technological advances are changing how we do business.  Inside the technology chapter, Schneier puts forth a list of principles for designing effective societal pressures, and I think it's a key point in the book.

To encourage everyone to act in the best interests of their society, we use moral pressure, reputational pressure, institutional pressure and security systems.  But our caveman brains are still best evolved for face-to-face transactions and handling life in a village.  These pre-sets don't work as well in a world where living in a city means having eight million neighbors, and doing business on the Internet with people we've never met.

So Schneier argues that we need to be careful in how we build our societal pressures.  He points out that while modern civilizations may concentrate on laws and security, it's foolish to disregard the value of morals and reputation because they still matter to people.

He also makes a good point about the need for 'general and reactive security systems.'  In other words, it's better to think broadly than on specific tactical threats.  Schneier writes, "One example is counterterrorism, where society is much better off spending money on intelligence, investigation and emergency response than on preventing specific terrorist threats, like bombs hidden in shoes or underwear."  I think any airline traveler who's had their shampoo bottle or fingernail clippers taken away, or had to undergo an invasive pat down, would probably agree.

Schneier writes about the need for transparency, too, especially in corporations and governments.  The system of checks-and-balances built into many democracies works best when the actions and finances of large actors like governments and corporations are kept open.  And I think all our governments and corporations could do with some transparency.

(Thanks to Bruce Schneier for writing an interesting book, and to Lori at the ThePRFreelancer.com for the advance copy.)

Comments Mystery Solved

For those who have tried to leave comments over the last month and then wondered why they didn't show up, I believe the mystery is finally solved.  Somehow in the transition from the old Blogger interface to the new one, my Settings did not hold.

Comments are moderated to prevent spam, but my email address was not filled in, so Blogger had nowhere to send the moderation notices to.  I just figured this out today and fixed it, so please comment on anything that strikes your fancy.

Sorry about that.  I am my own worst tech support.

Now go comment on something.  Thank you.