Month: November 2014

The Secret Lives of Passwords

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Ian Urbina, writing in The New York Times, confesses his fascinations with passwords. In a piece titled “The Secret Life of Passwords,” he explains:

Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

On the changing state of the passwords looking into the future:

This year, for example, Google purchased SlickLogin, a start-up that verifies IDs using sound waves. iPhones have come equipped with fingerprint scanners for more than a year now. And yet passwords continue to proliferate, to metastasize. Every day more objects — thermostats, car consoles, home alarm systems — are designed to be wired into the Internet and thus password protected. Because big data is big money, even free websites now make you register to view virtually anything of importance so that companies can track potential customers. Five years ago, people averaged about 21 passwords. Now that number is 81, according to LastPass, a company that makes password-storage software.

The TL;DR version:

Passwords do more than protect data. They protect dreams, secrets, fears and even clues to troubled pasts, and for some, they serve as an everyday reminder of what matters most.

It’s a wonderful piece, but makes me wonder about all the people Mr. Urbina interviewed who felt compelled to reveal (or maybe make up) their passwords to make themselves or their lives sound more interesting than they really are.

Anyway, my antidote to the humanizing of passwords: download, install, and use 1Password.

Bill Nye the Science Guy on Bow Ties, Books, and Binge Watching

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I loved this brief interview with Bill Nye the Science Guy in The Wall Street Journal. So many clever bits here.

I couldn’t agree more with this opinion of a book everyone should read. Elements of Style is on my bookshelf and one of my top ten all-around recommendations:

A book everyone should read is: The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. Omit needless words!

On his attire of choice:

My uniform is: a sportcoat and a bow tie. I started wearing bow ties in high school; it was then I realized their great utilitarian nature: They do not slip into your soup. They also do not flip into your flask when you’re in a lab. My favorite place to buy them is Seigo Neckwear, whose silk is really beautiful.

I am amazed by contact lenses too:

A technology that amazes me is: my contact lenses. They are multifocal. They breathe. They let water pass through them. And they’re disposable. Six bucks!

On paying attention when driving:

One thing everyone should do more of is: just drive while you’re driving. I have a custom license-plate holder. It says: “Try monotasking.”

The only thing that I disagreed with:

The most overrated tech trend is: binge watching. Sorry, I love you all, but I do not understand it. Knock yourselves out.

I’m anxiously awaiting for House of Cards, Season 3. Which I will likely binge watch.

Read the rest of the interview with Bill Nye here.

Evan Osnos Wins the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction

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The National Book Foundation recently announced its winners for 2014. Of interest to me is the winner for nonfiction, Evan Osnos (he is one of my favorite writers at The New Yorker). I haven’t read Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China but I have read his fantastic piece in The New Yorker titled “Boss Rail,” published in 2012:

Until now, China’s trains had always been a symbol of backwardness. More than a century ago, when the Empress Dowager was given a miniature engine to bear her about the Imperial City, she found the “fire cart” so insulting to the natural order that she banished it and insisted that her carriage continue to be dragged by eunuchs. Chairman Mao crisscrossed the countryside with tracks, partly for military use, but travel for ordinary people remained a misery of delayed, overcrowded trains nicknamed for the soot-stained color of the carriages: “green skins” were the slowest, “red skins” scarcely better. Even after Japan pioneered high-speed trains, in the nineteen-fifties, and Europe followed suit, China lagged behind, with what the state press bemoaned as two inches of track per person—“less than the length of a cigarette.”

In 2003, China’s Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, took charge of plans to build seventy-five hundred miles of high-speed railway—more than could be found in the rest of the world combined. For anyone with experience on Chinese trains, it was hard to picture. “Back in 1995, if you had told me where China would be today, I would have thought you were stark raving mad,” Richard Di Bona, a British transportation consultant in Hong Kong, told me recently. With a total investment of more than two hundred and fifty billion dollars, the undertaking was to be the world’s most expensive public-works project since President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, in the nineteen-fifties. To complete the first route by 2008, Minister Liu, whose ambition and flamboyance earned him the nickname Great Leap Liu, drove his crews and engineers to work in shifts around the clock, laying track, revising blueprints, and boring tunnels. “To achieve a great leap,” he liked to say, “a generation must be sacrificed.” (Some colleagues called him Lunatic Liu.) The state news service lionized an engineer named Xin Li, because he remained at his computer so long that he went partly blind in his left eye. (“I will keep working even without one eye,” he told a reporter.) When the first high-speed line débuted with a test run in June, 2008, it was seventy-five per cent over budget and relied heavily on German designs, but nobody dwelled on that during the ceremony. Cadres wept. When another line made its maiden run, Liu took a seat beside the conductor and said, “If anyone is going to die, I will be the first.”

Well worth the re-read.

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Also by Evan Osnos published in 2014: China’s “Web Junkies”

The Future of Atomic Clocks

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Tom O’Brian is the Chief of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) Quantum Physics Division (QPD). O’Brian oversees America’s master clock. In an interview with NPR, he discusses what the future of atomic clocks is going to be. A bit mind-bending:

Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death Valley. That’s because speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself discovered this dependence as part of his theory of relativity, and it is a very real effect.

The relative nature of time isn’t just something seen in the extreme. If you take a clock off the floor, and hang it on the wall, Ye says, “the time will speed up by about one part in 1016.”

The world’s most precise atomic clock is a mess to look at. But it can tick for billions of years without losing a second.

That is a sliver of a second. But this isn’t some effect of gravity on the clock’s machinery. Time itself is flowing more quickly on the wall than on the floor. These differences didn’t really matter until now. But this new clock is so sensitive, little changes in height throw it way off. Lift it just a couple of centimeters, Ye says, “and you will start to see that difference.”

So, this new clock would be able to sense the pace of time speeding up as it moves inch by inch away from the earth’s core.

What’s the point of having such high precision clocks? The extreme level of sensitivity to gravity might allow scientists to map the interior of Earth or help scientists find water and other resources underground.