“I can smell the sea from here,” says the prisoner. That seems a wild improbability coming from a man in a soundproof cell in northern Malaysia, several miles as the gull flies from the closest salt water. All I can smell in this humid, whitewashed prison is the faint tang of ammonia used to clean the floors.

It is hard to know what to believe of the prisoner’s claims. At times he has declared his innocence and then later confessed to being a willing criminal. He mentions he has three children, later the number is four. His passport lists his name as Johan Ariffin, but Malaysian authorities doubt that’s his real name. His age is noted as 44 (streaks of gray in his black hair make that plausible) and his residence as Batam, an Indonesian island just south of Singapore. Men like him often come from Batam, a guard says.

Though his jailers remain unsure who he is, they know exactly what he is: lanun (pronounced la-noon). When asked for a direct English equivalent, an interpreter explains that there is none, that it is a word freighted with many layers of culture and history. The short, imperfect answer is: The prisoner is a pirate.

Dark Passage: The Malacca Strait

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

See Nanochick's reply.

How to Make a Ph.D. Matter, by Louis Menand

If globalisation has made the world flatter, it has also fragmented it into crevices, mountains and a myriad of islets. The new media and the standardising technology favor the multiplication and radicalisation of identities. Today, minorities and fringe groups have a global reach. Against the power of the big ones, there is now the power of the few.

The power of the few | openDemocracy

The purpose of the experiment is to understand what goes on in a baboon’s mind, in this case how carefully the animals keep track of transient relationships.

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, a husband-and-wife team of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, have spent 14 years observing Moremi baboons. Through ingenious playback experiments performed by themselves and colleagues, the researchers say they have worked out many aspects of what baboons use their minds for, along with their limitations.

Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

How Baboons Think (Yes, Think)

In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear.

A few thoughts:

The Ascent to a Ph.D.:

Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way.

For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.

Are college faculty too liberal?

A range of theories were offered on the extent of ideological imbalance. Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, said he was surprised and worried by the extent of ideological homogeneity and he focused on how graduate education may encourage and be hurt by this trend.

Menand said that when he was in graduate school in the ’70s, people could hope for a Ph.D. in five years and felt free to propose ideas that challenged conventional wisdom in the humanities. Today, with graduate students facing a decade or more for a humanities doctorate, which Menand called an “obscene” amount of time, graduate students enroll only in programs in which they agree with their professors’ take on the discipline. With that much time involved, and an iffy job market, “who would do this if they didn’t share our views?” Menand asked. And the graduate students who enroll tell professors that the professors’ views are just right, he added, instead of trying out new theories.

“The profession isn’t so much reproducing itself as cloning itself,” Menand said. “If it was easier and cheaper to get in and out, the discipline would have a chance to get oxygenated” by people with new ideas, he added.

Something in the Way She Moves?

For a while now, I’ve fretted that we’re turning into a nation of weenies and permanently enraged censors, that too many of us are afraid of letting disagreeable or uncomfortable ideas into the limelight. If it’s not the p.c. overreach of campus “speech codes” or the attempts to criminalize “hate speech,” it’s the FCC’s crackdown on cussing in PBS documentaries and the Secret Service’s keeping protesters fenced off in “free speech zones.” But during the last month, this impulse to squelch—indulged by the left and the right and the milquetoast middle—seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as if we’ve entered a permanent state of hysterical overreaction.

Are the Controversial Comments of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Really So Threatening?

The double helix is much too simple to be the secret of life.

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

"You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."

Escape bird flu; visit the moons of Jupiter, or get your own moon.

Visualize open networks. Of text.

I had one little side room we called "the pi room," because on its walls were 53,000 digits of pi, done in pale green on black, a "Matrix" homage.

Crowd farming is people!

Behold, the all-seeing super-eye.

"The eventual goal is to have elaborate video surveillance well in advance of the 2016 Olympics."

TSA officials say the behavior-detection officers may play a more important role in thwarting terrorist attacks than traditional screening techniques.

I thought I saw the warm-vomit look in his eyes.

What society needs now are new ways to forget.

What are your Big Things?

Atlanta is hosed.

Coding is the New Maneuver.

Steven Colbert, the Man in the Irony Mask, has a new book.

Thanks to his innovative and ingenious books on the subject of cryptography, Bruce Schneier has become the world's most famous security expert. Now, his trio of revolutionary titles can be found in this unprecedented, value-priced collection.

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, Second Edition: This seminal encyclopedic reference provides readers with a comprehensive survey of modern cryptography. It describes dozens of cryptography algorithms, offers practical advice on how to implement them into cryptographic software, and shows how they can be used to solve security problems.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World: This narrative, straight-talking bestseller explains how to achieve security throughout computer networks. Schneier examines exactly what cryptography can and cannot do for the technical and business community.

Practical Cryptography: As the ideal guide for an engineer, systems engineer or technology professional who wants to learn how to actually incorporate cryptography into a product, this book bridges the gap between textbook cryptography and cryptography in the real world.

My guess is that the publisher wants to unload its stock of "Secrets & Lies". At $63 in paperback, compare to $28.65+$12.21+$31.50=$72.36. A $9 discount on the bundle? Hardly seems worth it.

Schneier's Cryptography Classics Library

Did you enjoy The Man in the Irony Mask?

Stephen Colbert's new book (which ships tomorrow) earns a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

Realizing that it takes more than thirty minutes a night to fix everything that's destroying America, Colbert bravely takes on the forces aligned to destroy our country—whether they be terrorists, environmentalists, or Kashi brand breakfast cereals. His various targets include nature (I've never trusted the sea. What's it hiding under there?), the Hollywood Blacklist (I would have named enough names to fill the Moscow phone book), and atheists (Imagine going through life completely duped into thinking that there's no invisible, omniscient higher power guiding every action on Earth. It's just so arbitrary!). Colbert also provides helpful illustrations and charts (Things That Are Trying to Turn Me Gay), a complete transcript of his infamous speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, and a special Holiday DVD, all of which add up to a book that is sure to be a bestseller and match the success of Colbert's former Daily Show boss Jon Stewart's America (The Book).

As explained on the book jacket:

You may not agree with everything Stephen says, but at the very least, you'll understand that your differing opinion is wrong.

I Am America (And So Can You!)

Microsoft C#UNG (pronounced “chung” and short for C# Universal Network/Graph System) is a desktop application that displays graphs, which are collections of vertices connected by edges. C#UNG can read graphs in several file formats, lay them out using one of several layout algorithms, and display them with a variety of display options. An Excel add-in enables graph data entered in an Excel worksheet to be displayed easily in C#UNG. The components used to develop the application are available as an API for developers who want to create and display graphs in their own applications.

C#UNG