Friday, June 10, 2005
If you're a technical person interested in digital security, here's a scary one: a team has produced two different documents, each with meaningful contents, but with identical MD5 hashes (signatures).
Tip of the hat to Bruce Schneier. The team's article is here.
This isn't quite the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, but...it shows that there might be a path there, which I for one was not expecting to be the case unless quantum computing is ever made practical.
Canada has long had socialized medicine, and its citizens have suffered greatly because of it (I can hear the liberals chanting already!). At "Enjoy Every Sandwich," the irreverent, occasionally obscene, and always funny Canadian blogger has some very interesting commentary about a recent Canadian Supreme Court ruling on the subject. An excerpt:
As is the case with mail delivery or killing unarmed Somali teenagers, the Canadian government isn't particularly efficient at it. In Ontario, where I live, health care eats up a full 40% of the provincial budget. If my math is correct, that's almost half! Half of every dollar in government spending goes toward health care. Even with 40 cents of every dollar going to health care, it hasn't stopped things like hospital closings or long lines for care.
In fact, doctors are essentially government employees in Ontario and have been since 1987. Not formally, or anything, but it stands to reason if someone dictates what you may or may not do and how much money you can make, they are your boss. As a general rule, people to not become doctor's just because they get to reach inside of you and play with your innards. While that's a bonus, doctor's go through the trouble and expense of medical school so that they may become mind-blowingly rich. As a consequence, Canadian doctors and nurses have been on a decades long exodus to the United States where they can make fuckloads of money and pay less tax on it.
Warning: if foul language and a little nudity offends you, don't click on the link above...
NASA's Deep Impact mission to the comet Tempel I will culminate on July 4 with the craft splitting into two pieces: the "impactor", an 850 pound chunk of copper that will strike the icy comet's core, and an instrument platform that will observe the comet and the impact. The science objective is to learn much more about the makeup of a comet.
Shortly after the mission was launched in January, scientists discovered that the high resolution imaging system — a key piece of instrumentation — would not focus correctly. Oops.
Now mission scientists have announced that they can "fix" the problem, with well-known deconvolution software that will "enhance" the blurry image by reversing, mathematically, the errors caused by the improperly focusing image. To do this, they had to first reconstruct the exact cause of the problem, and therein lies the achievement.
Space.com has the story. An excerpt:
However in March it was discovered that the Flyby spacecraft's High Resolution Instrument (HRI) was not focusing properly. The team will use a process, called deconvolution, to remedy the situation. Deconvolution is widely used in image processing and involves the reversal of the distortion created by the faulty lens of a camera or other optical devices, like a telescope or microscope.
"The process is a purely mathematical manipulation that works extremely well,” said Don Yoemans, a co-investigator for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is managing the mission for NASA.
“Even if you have a perfect telescope, which is limited by diffraction, you can use deconvolution to improve the resolution,” Yoeman said. “The process is sometimes time consuming, so the biggest effect on the science is a delay while you do all the processing to get the quality that you expected."
I'll bet there are some folks at NASA breathing much easier now! The whole mission story is quite interesting, and you can read about it on NASA's mission pages.
A short piece of commentary from the Wall Street Journal. It's so short that I've taken the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety:
Ever since the beginning of major combat operations in Iraq in March 2003, the media have kept a precise count of U.S. casualty figures, which now stand at nearly 1,700 killed and more than 6,400 wounded. There's also been plenty of tendentious speculation about the number of Iraqis killed by coalition action, the purpose of which is to cast Iraq's liberation as an unmitigated horror for Iraqis.
What has not been so carefully tracked, however, is the number of Iraqis killed by insurgent violence: the worshippers murdered as they pray in their mosques, the ranks of unemployed mowed down as they stand in line at government recruitment offices, and so on. We read about such incidents nearly every day but never see the cumulative death toll, perhaps because the cause of ordinary Iraqis finds few champions among trendy Western human-rights organizations.
Now the government of Iraq has gone and done that favor for itself. Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr released statistics last week showing that some 12,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by insurgents in the last 18 months. Of these victims, the overwhelming majority have been Iraqi Shiites, indicating that what al Jazeera and friends call the "resistance against U.S. occupation" is in fact a jihadist and Baathist attack against the country's democratic government. "I have not seen any 'resistance,'" Mr. Jabr told the Washington Post. "There is terror, and all sides have agreed that anyone raising guns and killing Iraqis is a terrorist."
Too bad some of our own politicians can't show as much moral clarity. Too bad, too, that every time we magnify every U.S. misdeed in Iraq, real or fabricated, we turn our gaze from the real source of the country's misery.
Too bad, indeed.
Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touch.
H. Ross Perot
