Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- The Doctor, Doctor Who: The Wheel in Space
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

If I only had a heart… (Happy 200)

In honor of my 200th post, I thought– well, okay, this has nothing to do with it being my bicentennial; I just noticed it when I clicked on “Entries” and saw the number 199 next to it. So, anyway, on with the post…
You may not know the term, but you’ve probably seen a CAPTCHA by now. The acronym expands out to the not-really-meaningful-unless-you’re-a-CS-guy “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. A bit of background:
Alan Turing, one of the founding bigwigs of the whole theory of computers as we know them, had this theory: If we stick a human being at a terminal of some sort (This was Turing, back in the fifties, so he was thinking of a teletype, but IM would work just as well) and have him chat for a bit with two other entities, one of which is a computer and the other one is a second human, if the guy at the terminal can’t tell which is which, the computer has demonstrated actual human intelligence, or, at least, something close enough to it to be interesting.
So, in a nutshell, a Turing Test is when a human tries to tell whether something else is a computer or a human. This is fairly easy (The human is less likely to say “BZZT! DESTROY ALL HUMANS!” if you annoy it). A CAPTCHA, which is sometimes ambigiously called a “Reverse Turing Test” is when a computer tries to tell if the entity it’s talking to is human or another computer.
That is to say, it’s one of those things you get when you sign up for something on the internet and they show you a picture of some distorted random letters and ask you to type them in.
This is actually a pretty hard test. It’s comparatively easy for one computer to convince another computer that it’s a computer (“Perform these six hundred hard math problems in under a second” is a pretty simple way), but how do you convince it that you’re human? The computer conducting the test can’t measure your capacity to love, or detect if you have opposible thumbs or anything like that — in fact, the reason that it’s so easy for a human to distinguish computers and humans is that humans can perceive a lot of things that computers can’t — which, of course, means that that distinguish a human (taking the test) from a computer (taking the test) are things that the computer (giving the test) can’t perceive.
So, the way to tell the difference is to generate the sort of problem that humans are good at solving and computers aren’t, and ask the test-taker to solve it. Fortunately, a computer can indeed generate problems it can’t solve itself. Or, a human can provide the computer (giving the test) with a crib sheet. The most common kind you see is the kind I mentioned above. Computers are pretty good at reading written words, but not if they’ve been distorted. So you print some letters in an image, mangle them a bit, and ask the test-taker to read them. This is doable, though it’s not all that easy: mangle the letters too much and a human can’t read them. Don’t mangle them enough, and a computer can. Most of the letter-based CAPTCHAs you see on the internet aren’t all that good, and throw up manglings that a very clever computer could work out, though there are some very good letter-mangling CAPTCHAs out there. Also, CAPTCHAs can often foil humans with vision problems (Like my color blindness).
Another CAPTCHA you see sometimes shows you several images and asks, say, “Which one is a puppy”, since that’s a hard thing for a computer to deduce. This works pretty well, but, unlike the letter-mangling test, the computer taking the test can’t generate new pictures of puppies, so unless it’s got a huge stockpile, the computer taking the test could just poke at random until it got in purely by coincidence.
I read a paper about CAPTCHAs back in grad school, and there was a really neat point they made. Unlike all the rest of computer security, if a CAPTCHA is broken, it’s basically great for mankind. Let me explain: You’ve by now probably heard of the animated cursor bug in Windows. No good can come of exploiting the animated cursor bug. There aren’t really useful things you can do by hacking an animated cursor. It’s good for exactly one thing: compromising systems to the owner’s detriment. Cryptography is largely based on number theory. Until modern cryptography was invented there was no practical use for number theory. People studied it purely for love of math. Aside from its mathematically interesting properties, the only practical use for the RSA algorithm is to encrypt data. Which means that if someone discovers a problem with the RSA problem, RSA encryption is broken. The problem itself has no positive use value, beyond breaking cryptosystems. This isn’t the case for a CAPTCHA: if a computer manages to foil a CAPTCHA, it means that the computer can do something which computers are historically bad at. If it can consistently find the puppy, then we have created a computer that can identify puppies, and puppy-identification is a skill with unlimited commercial application. If our computer can consistently read mangled words, then the next generation of business card scanner software will be able to tell that the business card you ran through it isn’t for “Lockheart Martini”.
But this is just a comically longwinded introduction to what I want to show you. Woe be to all of us the day a computer learns how to break the new Hotness CAPTCHA. It uses AmIHotOrNot API to ask users to identify which of several pictures shows the hottest person. Personally, I think they missed a great oppertunity by not calling it amibotornot.com.
The other CAPTCHA I’d like to show you comes to us via Defective Yeti: Internet Access CAPTCHAs. This one is designed to tell whether the testee is a human, a computer, or an idiot. What’s neat about this is that it’s much more likely to be foiled by a clever computer than a stupid human.
Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your porn

One IT To Rule Them All

Today’s IT comes to you from the “Internet Adverising Leads To Funny Juxtapositions” department.

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If this medium was ammenable to my doing my GWB impression, I’d say “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. *snicker* *snicker*” in my Bush voice. Frankly, the punch lines for this one are endless, but the funniest ones are all sound-gags, based on associating your choice of politically important entity with characters from Lord of the Rings (Dick Cheney referring to Haliburton as “My precious” might make a good one) But since I can’t, here’s your punch-line instead.
Even Bush could not have anticpated Mordor joining the axis of evil

Ross vs the Tivo, Round Two

As you may already know, I’ve had some trouble with my TiVo over the past few years.
Tonight, I had to reboot it; it locked up while I was deleting the jumk it had accumulated. Upon my reboot, I found that Something Was Wrong.
Specifically, whenever I pressed one of the arrow keys, the thing would go crazy, scrolling to the bottom of the list and then making the “You’re at the bottom of the list. Stop pressing down, stupid” noise until I pressed something else. So, thinking maybe the remote was jammed, I stuck my hand over the business end. No joy.
So I googled. No joy.
So I reset the tivo again. No joy.
I reset the TiVo remote. No joy.
It was fine until you pressed a button, then it went crazy. Finally, I noticed that the yellow “I’m receiving an IR signal” light was staying lit. (I should note at this point that I’m colorblind, and only know that the light is yellow thanks to information I’ve found on-line; it looks the same color as the green “I’m connected to a power source” light to me). Whenever I hit a button, the light would stay on. Sometimes it would go off as I gesticulated angrily at it.
I replaced the batteries in the remote. No joy.
I tried standing up and placing my hand over the IR receiver. The yellow light went out. I tried zapping it from inches way. That worked fine. One down key, moves down once. Yellow light flashes then goes out.
I tried from further away. Yellow stays on. Key keeps repeating.
I got it into my head that maybe my ceiling fan (being reflective) or some other light source in the room was creating some sort of weird feedback loop. Turned off everything. No joy.
What I did find was that if I waved my hand in front of the receiver, the yellow light would switch off. This worked at close range only. At greater distances, I had to gesticulate more wildly.
I sat down, resigned to the fact that my TiVo was once again borked.
And then I worked it out.
Here is my reverse-engineered algorithm for how the TiVo remote control subsystem works:

if ((x=incoming tivo keypress))
while (tivo is receiving any sort of IR signal at all)
do x

You see, I wear ankle weights most days, in order to beef up my exercise regimen — which turned out to be a double-edged sword, as I will explain in a later issue — in the hopes of keeping my diabetes in check.
You’re probably wondering at this point what this has to do with, well, anything at all. What it has to do is this: When I got home tonight, one of the first things I did was to take off my ankle weights. I set them on the couch beside the very spot which currently contains my ass. I set them on top of a small pile of paid bills that I have to file.
What I didn’t know was what was under those bills.
The remote control to my DVD player.
You see, my weights had pushed one of the buttons on the DVD remote. That signal, on its own, was not enough to fool the TiVo. However, whenever the TiVo saw a legitimate signal from its own remote, the fact that it was still seeing an unrelated signal kept it going. When the remote operated normally at close range, it was because my body was blocking the spurious DVD remote signal. When I gesticulated angrily, I was cutting past the beam from the remote.
Hopefully, googling this will help future generations. That’s why I’m adding the following gibberish, it being things I tried googling in order to find out what the hell was going on:
tivo yellow light
tivo doesn’t respond to remote
tivo remote light stays lit
tivo extra button presses
tivo remote spurious presses
tivo arrow buttons
tivo scrolling goes crazy
(Kind folks at Google: Please don’t mistake this for a shameless attempt to pad out my page to attract hits. This is what I googled for to try to find the answer to my question, which means that it’s part of the story about what I did to solve the problem. Thanks)

Economy of Scale

As you may know by now, there was some news recently about A guy dying of a toothache because he didn’t have insurance. I hadn’t been planning to comment, because, hey, it happens. Even at my most financially destitute, I could have swing $80 for a tooth extraction, but it’s entirely possible that I’d have fallen victim to the same fate, not because I couldn’t afford health care, but because I’m stubborn and don’t seek medical assistance for anything less serious than dismemberment.
And it does seem to me like those least able to afford health care seem to want the most out of it. A few years back, I was with someone who was, I think I have mentioned, crazy. It seemed like once a week, she went to the hospital because she had some minor complaint that, had it been me, I’d have just toughed through. In fact, she left a voicemail for me a few days ago, and one of the things she was proud to report was that she’d been in a car accident a few months ago, and therefore was now getting a disability check.
Anecdotal evidence is, as we all know, the best kind. Many of my friends have absolute faith in capitalism, and overlook the fact that all of the nationalized health care systems in the world are far more efficient than the private US system. Heck, even the nationalized US system is far more efficient (Medicare is one of the most efficient medical systems on the planet. In fact, it’s one of the most efficient anythings on the planet). Anyone who tells you different is plainly and simply mistaken (or lying. Some of them are lying. Not all, but the last time I tried to be nice and pretend I believed they were all honestly mistaken, a conservative friend insisted I was being naive, and that, beyond the easily mislead sheeple, all the “real” conservatives knew these were lies, and pushed them because oppressing the proletariat is good for the rich capitalists, and, via the magic of trickle-down, therefore also good for the oppressed proles).
But anyway, you can believe that the masses should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. You can believe that welfare is inherently paternalistic. You can believe that private charities should be responsible for taking care of the poor rather than the government (That, as it turns out, is provably false. Until fairly recently, the government didn’t get involved in taking care of the poor, it was left to private charities, mostly the churches. Poverty was a lot higher back then. Not just a little higher. Not lower.) You can claim that welfare moms are all deadbeats who pop out babies in order to keep those checks rolling in at the expense of good honest working folk (This is also false, but, hey, anecdotal evidence). You can claim that you don’t beliueve the poor are lazy and stupid and deserve what they get, but that the system rewards laziness and stupidity and therefore unless we stop giving the poor a hand, they’ll never learn to take care of themselves (That’s got some truth in it; a perpetual problem of systems like welfare and unemployment is that you lose the benefits as soon as you start to pull yourself up, rather than once you’ve finished pulling yourself up). You can claim that privitizing everything will be good for everyone. But.
Medical benefits are hard to come by and getting harder. They will continue to get harder to come by. This is not the fault of the government. This is not the fault of the poor. This will not be improved by more privitization. This will not be solved by litigation shields which allow insurers to savagely roger their customers to death without feat of being sued for it. This is not the fault of deadbeats who insist on expensive procedures when dying would be a whole lot cheaper. It’s the fault of the fact that they need to make money. And they’re failing to do so (Several major health insurers are in some bad financial places right now). They’re failing to do so for a lot of reasons. None of them can grow big enough for the economy of scale to really help them out. They all have to waste resources competing with each other. They all have huge administrative machines that are lubricated with pure money. And, of course, health insurance is an inherently losing game: they wager you’ll never get sick, or at least that you’ll die quickly and without much fuss, you wager you will. Everybody loses. Monopolies make things efficient. Competition makes things honest. You can’t have both with private industry.
You can, if you like, suppose that a government monopoly would be corrupt, evil, power-mad. Hey, why not? But everything you can say about a government monopoly, you can say about a private one. The converse is not true. Once you’ve got a government monopoly, profit is out of the equation. A private monopoly has a good reason to be corrupt and evil: it wants money. It can also be corrupt and evil for abstract cartoonish reasons like being bent on world domination. Only one of these applies to a government monopoly, and, frankly, it’s the one I find a little more believable. I’m all for capitalism in the 99% of cases where we can suffer some inefficiencies. All I’m saying is that if you’ve got to have a monopoly, I think a government-run one is a better idea.
And when it comes to health care, we need a monopoly. We need universal coverage.
I said in the beginning that I hadn’t planned to comment. Maybe you’re wondering why I did. The thing I didn’t tell you before about why January was rough for me is this: I have diabetes.
It’s a serious but very controllable disorder. So long as I keep it under control, it’s unlikely anything bad will happen as a result of it. It means that I have to watch what I eat and I have to exercise more, which would have been true regardless of this condition. It means that I have to take a pill every day, and I have to poke a tiny little hole in myself a couple of times a day to test my blood sugar. And I have to see a doctor every three months.
For the rest of my life.
My insurance covers almost everything. So I don’t have to pay most of the $300 dollars a month that my medicine costs. I don’t have to pay most of the $150 that a doctor’s visit costs. I don’t have to pay the $100 that test strips cost.
For about three years, I did not have health insurance. I managed to get away without seeing a doctor for that time, though it was pretty hard the last time I threw my back out. Actually, I pulled a muscle in my foot about a week before my coverage started, and that was a lot of fun let me tell you.
Money was tight for me during that time. In an emergency, I coulda swung $80 to have a tooth pulled.
But I couldn’t have swung several hundred bucks every month for medication.
Last night, I got the invoice from the hospital, for meeting with a diabetes educator who was very helpful in showing me how to not end up going blind, having a heart attack, losing my legs, and y’know, dying of diabetic ketoacidocis. My insurance covered it, of course. But if this had happened a year ago, when I was self-employed, living from check to check without any insurance, I could not have paid this. I could not have swung $500 in hospital bills. I could not have swung whatever they’ll charge me for my followup visits.
So, as I was saying. I have type 2 diabetes. It is a serious but very controllable disorder.
Unless you don’t have insurance, in which case it is a death sentence.
There’s your anecdotal evidence.

IT62: SNAKES ON A LOGO

A couple of weeks ago, the IAEA and ISO put forward a brand new symbol to makr areas where the danger of ionizing radiation is present. The new symbol is to supplement the classic black-on-yellow trefoil you so associate with radiation hazards.
Basically, it was felt that the classic symbol on its own did not really carry any semantic meaning: it wasn’t clear from looking at it what it meant. The new design has been extensively tested on various groups to ensure that, at just a glance, its meaning is absolutely clear:

it62

If your ceiling fan starts dropping tapeworms on pirates, run like hell.