Ben Laurie:

One simply cannot properly secure a general-purpose operating system.

We suggest a solution that involves taking both the Blue Pill and the Red Pill: providing the trusted path by means of a separate device with a secure operating system, used in tandem with the existing general purpose operating system.

Choose the Red Pill and the Blue Pill

"The results, I confess, were somewhat surprising, and not in a good way."

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Homeowners re-defaulting after getting aid

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends' friends, and their friends' friends' friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Social Networks and Happiness

Wesley Yang, on The Dark Side:

These experts "reverse engineered" their techniques ... The idea was to induce the "learned helplessness" that psychologists had shown it was possible to create in dogs.

Yoo and Addington, who were, for a time, "running the War on Terror almost on their own," as one official told Mayer, pursued this agenda with a singular ruthlessness neatly summarised in Addington's promise to "keep pushing and pushing and pushing until some larger force makes us stop."

The Nerve and the Will:

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Sterling Hayden:

If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Andrew Bacevich:

Sometimes the effect of diving into the sea is anything but cleansing.

Decius:

Overestimating the threat, when you're lining people up against the wall without due process, does have a cost, and frankly it's your soul.

Finally:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Blight unto the nations

Eytan Adar, and others:

The Web is ephemeral. Pages change frequently, and it is nearly impossible to find data or follow a link after the underlying page evolves. We present Zoetrope, a system that enables interaction with the historical Web (pages, links, and embedded data) that would otherwise be lost to time. Using a number of novel interactions, the temporal Web can be manipulated, queried, and analyzed from the context of familar pages. Zoetrope is based on a set of operators for manipulating content streams. We describe these primitives and the associated indexing strategies for handling temporal Web data. They form the basis of Zoetrope and enable our construction of new temporal interactions and visualizations.

From the archive:

Hacks can express dissatisfaction with local culture or with administrative decisions, but mostly they are remarkably good-spirited. They are also by definition ephemeral.

Decius:

On the one hand, the web is very much the human knowledge system. Often people who are maintaining parts of it don't respect that, and aren't economically incentivized to respect it ...

On the other hand, the human memory is imperfect for good reason. People forget because if we remembered everything perfectly people would be constantly held accountable for things that they did years and years ago when they were very different people. People forgive and forget because people learn and mature.

I fear we are heading for a world that is the worst of both.

Take note:

Every culture has its own word for this nothing.

Stewart Brand and Freeman Dyson:

Brand: How might long-term ethics differ from ethics as we generally understand them?

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Remember when:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

Zoetrope: Interacting with the Ephemeral Web

In 1955, before the national highway system was developed, the median home was 1,000 square feet and had 3.6 people living in it.

Now, the median home is 2,400 square feet and shelters 2.3 people.

"Seclusion is a fact of life."

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into.

Earning More, Commuting Farther

Henry Greely, and others, in Nature:

Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement. That response must start by rejecting the idea that 'enhancement' is a dirty word.

From the archive:

When imagining the possible influences of efficient cognitive enhancers on society as a whole, there can be many positive effects. Such drugs may enable individuals to perform better and enjoy more achievements and success. However, cognitive enhancers may have a darker side.

Also:

The tasking for this study was to evaluate the potential for adversaries to exploit advances in Human Performance Modification, and thus create a threat to national security.

Oh, Joy!

The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy

Sue Halpern, in The New York Review of Books:

What you get is the war without the war story.

Freed from those conventions -- from the demands of plot, from the typically false dichotomy between good guys and bad guys, and unburdened of ambiguity, of bravado, of cant, there is only one thing in sight, and that is consequence.

The brutal honesty of these cases demands a brutally honest response.

It is no wonder that the military censors tried hard to keep this book from commercial release.

From the archive:

Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker’s book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true.

From a review of a book by Roger Penrose:

"What a joy it is to read a book that doesn't simplify, doesn't dodge the difficult questions, and doesn't always pretend to have answers."

Have you seen Happy-Go-Lucky?

The film opens with her visiting a bookshop and fingering a copy of Roger Penrose's book, The Road to Reality. "Don't want to go there," she mutters to herself. Meanwhile, outside, her bicycle is being stolen.

The War We Don't Want to See

"It was a little alarming, to say the least."

The episode – reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr Strangelove – dramatically illustrates how easy it would be for another war to break out between India and Pakistan, even accidentally, following the Mumbai attacks.

From the archive:

A: "You know, we have a lot in common because personally one of my favorite activities is to hunt, too."

P: "Oh, very good. We should go hunting together."

Of course:

"You can't fight here! This is the war room!"

Hoax phone call 'almost took Pakistan to war'

Jon Evans, at The Walrus:

I can’t shake the notion that police cameras are only the thin edge of the panopticon wedge, and that the loss of privacy will lead slowly but inevitably to the loss of liberty.

Also, Charlie Stross:

Think of it as Google for real life.

From the archive, McLuhan:

“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

Also:

A brilliant surgeon, Dr. Génessier, helped by his assistant Louise, kidnaps nice young women. He removes their faces and tries to graft them onto the head on his beloved daughter Christiane, whose face has been entirely spoiled in a car crash. All the experiments fail, and the victims die, but Génessier keeps trying ...

Never Forget:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

Big Brother is Watching Them. OK?