Next to measured readings, their history data, extreme values and the permissible limits for the sensors, other information about your computer can be displayed as well. This includes the processor type, processor and bus frequencies, manufacturing data, the S.M.A.R.T. verification state of your hard drives, connectors on Intel mainboards, and many other items.

Temperature Monitor: Learn more about your Mac

A selection of fiction:

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER. By Tom Perrotta
A FREE LIFE. By Ha Jin
THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid
THROW LIKE A GIRL: Stories. By Jean Thompson
TREE OF SMOKE. By Denis Johnson.
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: Stories. By Alice Munro

And some non-fiction:

ARSENALS OF FOLLY: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. By Richard Rhodes
DUE CONSIDERATIONS: Essays and Criticism. By John Updike
HOW TO TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ. By Pierre Bayard
LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. By Tim Weiner
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century. By Alex Ross

100 Notable Books of the Year

NYT profiles the author of Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, which I recommended when it was published in 2004.

“Good enough had never been good enough." But now, for listeners and even the industry, “good enough is good enough.”

An anecdote on the theme:

Fifteen years ago, a rotund man in his mid-40's walked into a mom-and-pop computer store. It was the dawn of CD-ROMs and "multimedia", of single-disc encyclopedias, offering ready recall of everything from JFK's moon speech to early Louis Armstrong, along with convenient playback through the combination of that new marvel, the Sound Blaster, and a pair of compact "computer speakers".

To the staff at the store, he would become known as Analog Man. He rejected everything about the Way New Multi Media, all the way down to its binary core. He insisted on the superiority of the analog production chain. To support his position, he claimed to be able to discern the subtlest murmuring from the noise on his pristine vinyl editions of The Dark Side of the Moon. He defied anyone to repeat the feat with digital equipment, spare no expense.

Analog Man did not buy a computer that day.

Hard to Be an Audiophile in an iPod World

To an outsider, it may seem a mere bureaucratic blip that Gen. David Petraeus was called back from Iraq last week to chair the promotion board that picks the Army's next new one-star generals. But, in fact, the story (first reported by Ann Scott Tyson in the Washington Post) is a very big deal—potentially the first rumble of a seismic shift in the very core of the U.S. military establishment.

The promotion board is the vehicle through which the Army's dominant culture is perpetuated—a behind-closed-doors committee of 15 generals that each year selects the 35 to 40 colonels (out of 1,000 applicants) who rise to the rank with stars. As with all gateway panels in every profession, the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image—officers whose careers look like theirs.

...

"Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued." If innovative officers see that their innovations are not valued, they'll either conform or leave.

Army to Petraeus: Fix Us!

The Coen Brothers talk to Charlie Rose about their new movie, No Country for Old Men.

Joel and Ethan Coen, on the Charlie Rose Show

Here is Paul Davies:

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

There are a bunch of responses at Edge. Related archive items:

Religious scholars mull Flying Spaghetti Monster

How To Defend Society Against Science

Taking Science on Faith

Robert Kaplan:

There is an attitude gaining currency in media and policy circles that lumps everything our military is doing abroad with Iraq. It says that our armed forces are overextended, that we are using them to force our democratic ideals down people's throats and that we need to be more humble and less militaristic. But on a deployment-by-deployment basis, the truth couldn't be more different.

More Kaplan:

Imperial Grunts

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

When North Korea Falls

While the United States is in its fourth year of a war in Iraq, it has been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans have been killed on the Korean peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Most Americans hope and expect that we will withdraw from Iraq within a few years—yet we still have 32,000 troops in South Korea, more than half a century after the armistice. Korea provides a sense of America’s daunting, imperial-like burdens.

While in the fullness of time patience and dogged persistence can breed success, it is the kind of success that does not necessarily reward the victor but, rather, the player best able to take advantage of the new situation. It is far too early to tell who ultimately will benefit from a stable and prosperous Mesopotamia, if one should ever emerge. But in the case of Korea, it looks like it will be the Chinese.

The Coming Anarchy

How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet

Following on the last item above, see also, Johnathan Rapley on The New Middle Ages.

Unheralded military successes

In recent work, various fractal image coding methods are reported, which adopt the self-similarity of images to compress the size of images. However, till now, no solutions for the security of fractal encoded images have been provided. In this paper, a secure fractal image coding scheme is proposed and evaluated, which encrypts some of the fractal parameters during fractal encoding, and thus, produces the encrypted and encoded image. The encrypted image can only be recovered by the correct key. To keep secure and efficient, only the suitable parameters are selected and encrypted through in-vestigating the properties of various fractal parameters, including parameter space, parameter distribu-tion and parameter sensitivity. The encryption process does not change the file format, keeps secure in perception, and costs little time or computational resources. These properties make it suitable for secure image encoding or transmission.

Secure Fractal Image Coding

Anonymity is Hard.

We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary's background knowledge.

We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber's record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.

See also:

Hushmail Spills it to Feds

AOL Search Database

Why Information Security is Hard

Don Kerr, on Anonymity and Privacy

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

WikiScanner on the Colbert Report

How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset

Major hack! It's a TAZ in the city of light!

It is one of Paris's most celebrated monuments, a neoclassical masterpiece that has cast its shadow across the city for more than two centuries.

But it is unlikely that the Pantheon, or any other building in France's capital, will have played host to a more bizarre sequence of events than those revealed in a court last week.

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

More from The Independent:

Members of UX, including students, but also lawyers, nurses and even a public prosecutor, have turned instead to nocturnal invasions of public buildings and Métro stations. "Lazar", a spokesman for the Untergunther group, told the French national newspaper, Le Monde: "We are not squatters. These are urban no-go zones. We use them for non-political, creative gatherings, such as film festivals and renovating the country's architectural heritage."

Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock