He Fooled Everyone...

Remember this winter when a photograph of a New York City cop who bought a $100 pair of boots for a homeless guy went viral?  The cop was (appropriately) lauded, and everybody felt great about it.  Barefoot in the winter, the homeless guy was now well-equipped.

But...

The “homeless guy” was a fake.  The cop didn't know it, but this guy was running a scam, pretending to be a homeless guy while raking in over $100k tax-free dollars a year from generous New Yorkers.  He also has dozens of pairs of shoes donated by Good Samaritans like the cop, all stored in his (rather nice) apartment.

Sigh...

FJ Mods: Wheels and Tires...

This was a simple modification, exchanging the factory alloy wheels (vulnerable to shattering if smacked hard on a rock) and street tires for steel wheels and offroad tires.  We got these wheels and these tires, and we're quite happy with both.  The puncture-resistant Kevlar sidewalls and tread design are a perfect combination for what we're going to be doing offroad, and the silica rubber is superior on wet surfaces. 

FJ Mods: Ravelco...

Yesterday I finished the most difficult modification I've done yet: installation of a Ravelco theft prevention device (photo at right).  If you've never heard of Ravelco, don't feel bad – I'd never heard of it either until very recently.

For years now, I've known that automobile burglar alarms were almost completely ineffective as a theft deterrent.  Insurance companies keep wonderful statistics on such things, and these statistics don't lie: cars equipped with burglar alarms are actually more likely to be stolen than those without.  The actuaries are certain that counter-intuitive result is a sampling bias problem – desirable cars are (of course!) more likely to have a burglar alarm installed.  But here's the statistic that tells you burglar alarms don't work: there is no statistically significant difference between the theft rates for any particular car model and year for those with or without burglar alarms.  None. Zip. Nada.

So how do you keep your car from being stolen?  LoJack will help you recover it once it has been stolen, but what if you'd like to avoid the theft in the first place?  Currently the best theft deterrents are “immobilizers” – devices that keep a thief from operating your car.  Immobilizers won't stop a really determined thief who loads your ride onto a tow truck and makes off with it, but they will stop the more typical thief who's going to hot-wire the ignition and drive away.

Immobilizers work by disabling some vital part of your car's electronics, most commonly some combination of starter motor, ignition, fuel pump, fuel injectors, or automatic transmission control.  Nearly all immobilizers are wired under the dashboard, which makes them vulnerable to a knowledgeable thief who wants to disable them.  YouTube and many web sites have videos that teach you how to hot-wire immobilizer-equipped cars, with examples from many makes and models (especially the factory-supplied immobilizers).  Clever people figure out the method, then people with questionable motivations publish the videos showing the techniques.  Yikes!

Enterprising and knowledgeable car owners often install “kill switches” in a hidden location.  These kill switches do the same thing a commercial immobilizer does (interrupting some vital electronics), but in a simpler and non-standard way.  The non-standard part makes it harder for the thief; the simpler part makes it easier: if a thief crawls under the dash and spots the kill switch or its wires, he knows exactly what to do to defeat the kill switch.

The Ravelco folks had a very simple idea about how to make a more effective “kill switch”.  Then they added some clever bits to make it harder to defeat.  The result is a ridiculously simple device, with nothing to go wrong, that's remarkably hard to defeat.  It's also hard to install :)

The simple idea is this: the Ravelco socket (at right, above) is installed somewhere inside your car.  In my case I installed it in a hidden location that's very easy to get to.  That socket has 16 pins, but only five of them are connected to the five wires that extend from the back of the socket: two pairs and a ground wire.  The Ravelco plug (at left, above) has a matching set of 16 pins, but only four pins are wired up (two pairs of pins are wired together).  Both the socket and the plug have their wiring embedded in the hard molded plastic; you can't look at it to see which wires are wired to which pins. 

Each of the pairs of wires is connected to some vital electronic system in such a way that when the plug is removed that electronic system is disabled.  In my case I wired them into the ignition power circuit and the fuel injector power circuit.  With the plug removed, you can crank the engine over but it won't start: there's no fuel and there's no spark.  With the plug installed, the fuel injectors and ignition gets power, and the car runs fine.

If a thief is faced with the empty Ravelco socket and wants to make a brute force attack, here's what he's up against.  If you do the math, there are over a half million permutations of the wiring arrangement.  Every Ravelco is wired differently, so the thief, on average, would have to try a quarter million different jumper arrangements before he found the one that worked.  It's actually not quite that good, as the pin connected to ground can be found easily with an ohmmeter, but still the thief would need to try over 100,000 jumper arrangements.  Each jumper arrangement would take at least 5 seconds to insert and test - so we're talking about almost a week of 24-hour-a-day testing to find the answer.  Brute force isn't going to work :)

Here's where the extra clever bits on the Ravelco come into play.  First, the wires coming out the back of the plug are inside a flexible steel sheath, which extends all the way to the firewall (where the wires go through a hole into the engine compartment).  It would be very difficult indeed for a thief working inside your car to extract those wires and try shorting various wires together.  With just five wires, the number of combinations to test is considerable smaller: just ten.

So the thief would have to open your engine compartment, find the right wires (if you've ever looked inside a modern engine, you know that even that step is challenging – there are a lot of wires in there!), and then try shorting them together in various combinations.  However, there's a problem there: some combinations are likely to blow a fuse.  Once you blow the fuse, none of the combinations will work.  So to maximize his chances of success, the thief needs to follow those wires to their destination so he can figure out on the first try which wires need to be shorted together.

Ravelco goes to great lengths to tell you to hide those wires deep inside big cable harnesses.  That's what makes it difficult to install, but it also adds a tremendous degree of difficulty for the thief.  In my case the wires are buried inside three feet of cable harness, traversing four junctions in the process.  The thief would have no choice but to laboriously follow those wires to where they connect with factory wires, all without interrupting any other wires.  With all the right tools and perfect knowledge, I'd guess that would take about an hour.  What thief would work under the hood of your car for an hour?

Simple idea, clever implementation.  I recommend it.  Ravelco's business arrangements are clever, too.  Usually it costs $500 to $750 to get a Ravelco installed.  There are about $10 worth of parts in it, so that's a lot of profit margin!  The reason they can maintain this is that they won't sell you the parts directly – only dealers can buy the parts, and the dealers are contractually obligated to provide the Ravelco installed.  That installation is where they make their money.  I was lucky enough to find a brand-new Ravelco on eBay.  I bought it from some enterprising fellow who bought the assets of a failed Ravelco dealer, including his inventory of brand-new Ravelcos.  As I write this, there are still quite a few available.  I paid $50, and then was able to make an installation the way I wanted to, with the maximum amount of buried wires.  I've read stories of much poorer dealer installations; they, of course, are motivated to reduce the time they spend on the installation.

Forget Reservoirs and Power Grids...

After 9/11 there was a surplus of crazy talk about the vulnerability (and need to protect) public infrastructure like water reservoirs (easily poisoned, the thinking was) and electrical power grids (remote high-tension lines are vulnerable).  Fortunately the level of this crazy talk has dropped significantly upon the realization of two things: (1) protecting all this infrastructure was completely impossible (it's too darned big and distributed), and (2) it really isn't as vulnerable as it seems (there's lots of redundancy built in).

This news story about divers trying to sever an Internet cable feeding Egypt got me to thinking about the vulnerability of the Internet to terrorists.  Those Internet cables, which I've written about before, are vulnerable to attack and (if severed) could have large economic impacts.  Furthermore, the routers that terminate those cables are potentially vulnerable to attack over the Internet itself (hacking, in other words). 

In most of the developed world there is sufficient redundancy in these cables that it would be very difficult for an attacker to cause serious economic harm.  For instance, New York City has dozens of Internet “feeds” connecting it to the rest of the Internet.  Taking out all those feeds at once would be exceedingly difficult.

In some other parts of the world (like Egypt), this is not true – there may only be a few (sometimes even just one!) Internet feed connecting an entire region to the Internet.  If a terrorist organization were to take out those feeds, that region would likely suffer considerable damage.  Very little international business today is conducted without the use of the Internet.  Even simple things, such as buying bulk loads of spices from Madagascar, often rely on the Internet for the marketing, sales, negotiation, funds transfer, and coordination of the purchase.  In those places, I would think the Internet cable would be a prime target for the bad guys...

Red State Success...

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore have a piece in today's Wall Street Journal ($) that delves into the quite evident differences in economic success between red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) states.  If you've been paying attention to this at all, there's not much news in here (though there are a few interesting observations I hadn't heard before).  If you haven't been paying attention to the differences between the various states, it's a great (and very short) primer on the topic.

Every time I think about these obvious differences, I wonder the same thing to myself: how is it possible that voters keep voting for the politicians who have inflicted economic disaster upon them?  The best theory I know of to explain it is the “low information voter” theory – the idea that most voters really don't have any rational basis for their vote; they just vote for whomever “feels” better to them.

Then I just get sad...

The 12 Most Controversial Math Problems...

Upon seeing this headline, I clicked to see what I thought would be an article on problems that challenged mathematicians, but that's not at all what this article is about.  Instead, it's about math problems that challenge ordinary people's understanding – and it's quite well explained and illustrated.  About half of these problems are some I'd run across before as brain teasers; the other half were new to me.  All were interesting and illuminating.  Recommended reading!

Nuts to Them...

So says Mark Steyn, on the occasion of a particularly galling ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court.  Mr. Steyn has a short piece on the ruling, with this conclusion:

...In Canada, the law denies "the right to say his piece" to the likes of Bill Whatcott, a man who believes that homosexuals are sinners and in need of God's grace and forgiveness, but it has no objection to those who think homosexuals are evil and should be put to death. Mr. Philips need never fear the scrutiny of the "human rights" commission, or the cost of ten-year legal battles.

No homosexual needs the state's protection from Bill Whatcott. But all of us need protection from nitwit jurists blithely sacrificing core Western liberties to ideological compliance. It's not about Left vs. Right, gay vs. straight, religious vs. secular; it's about free vs. unfree. And on that most profound question, Canada's supreme court is on the wrong side. Nuts to them.

But do go read the whole thing...

Go 1.1...

A new release of Google's Go programming language...

Dragon Dreams...

It looks likely that giant aeroships will sail the skies again, in the not too distant future...

I'm Not Going to Africa...

...because they're suffering from a rash of genital theft:

Reports of genital theft have spread like an epidemic across West and Central Africa over the past two decades, in tandem with what appears to be a general resurgence of witchcraft on the continent. Anthropologists have explained this rise as a response to an increasingly mystifying and capricious global economy. Which is to say that when the workings of capital are as genuinely obscure as they are in today’s Africa, proceeding behind a veil of complexity and corruption, rumors of “occult economies”—often involving a trade in human organs—offer a less mystifying explanation for the radical disparities in wealth on display.

Biden Blooper...

I guess that headline is a bit redundant, eh?  A few days ago, Joe Biden amused many knowledgeable about guns – and infuriated many of the female members of that cohort.  Now there's a short video demonstrating where these reactions came from:


We have a semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun with a seven shell magazine.  When loaded with magnum shells and shooting repeatedly, that thing will practically knock me down (and I'm not exactly a lightweight).  It leaves big bruises on my shoulder.  It would take an unusually strong woman to comfortably handle that weapon...

Race Needs This...

Race is our young border collie, who is obsessed with chasing anything roughly round that you might throw.  Pine cones, tennis balls, styrofoam packing material, it doesn't matter.  Our arms get tired of throwing long before he gets tired of retrieving.  This machine, scaled up for outdoor use and 200' throws, would be perfect for him:

Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense...

Awesome.

Let's Hear it for Weirdos!

I take some pride in being weird – a weirdo.  I've long proclaimed that being normal is boring.  This morning I read a great blog post by Michael Lazerow that ends with this:

Weirdos don’t see anything as impossible. Anything is possible. Just give us enough time.

Weirdos are contrarians. They think differently and act even more differently. Normals try to fit in. Weirdos stick out without really trying.

Weirdos aren’t driven by money. Money is a destination. Weirdos are all about the journey.

Weirdos don’t care what others think. They only care THAT they think and want to change HOW they think.

Weirdos come in all shapes and sizes, colors and countries. And they're not new to the tech industry, or industry in general.

Weirdos thought it made sense to get on the Mayflower from England to settle in a new land.

Weirdos thought we should get rid of slavery.

Weirdos insisted that women should also have a vote.

The world would suck if it weren’t for weirdos.

Instead of trying to get our kids to fit in, we should help them celebrate why they are different.

Let’s start to teach kids to embrace weird. Weird is good.

And let’s not stop until weird is normal.

A high-Q resonance here...

Strange Programming Language Features...

Fascinating thread on StackExchange, if you're of a geekly bent...

Mandatory School Subject: Chess...

The little country of Armenia has made the study of chess a required subject in its public schools.  There seem to be two objectives: grooming chess masters (to make Armenia a chess powerhouse), and training young minds to think.

Where and when I grew up (New Jersey, in the '50s and '60s), chess was popular.  We had no actual chess classes, but we did have a chess club that offered instruction, and it was easy to get matches at any level.  I was a semi-serious player in junior high school, active in the schools chess club; less so before and after that.  I do believe that having an enjoyable pastime that required intellectual discipline and active thought was helpful in developing my mind.  I can't say it was all chess, though, as I had several such pastimes.  More important to me at the time was my interest in designing electronic systems.  Later – specifically, while teaching myself how to program in the '70s – I remember noting that the process of designing and writing programs “felt” a lot like the process of seriously playing chess.  There's the body of practical experience to learn from, elements of strategy and tactics in the design, and even the notion of sequential execution (that is, the way chess moves occur in a specific order is analogous to the way computers execute instructions one after the other).  On occasion, I've even thought of programming as involving an active opponent :)

I can't help but wonder what the results of this experiment will be...

FJ Cruiser Dual Battery Mod...

I just completed installing a secondary battery system in our FJ Cruiser.  There are lots of reasons to have a dual battery system, but from my perspective the most important one is simple: redundancy.  I don't want to have to hike out from somewhere deep in the boondocks just because I stupidly ran down my battery.  If I have to hike out, I want it to be for a good reason!  :)

In addition to simple redundancy, though, the second battery provides more current when it's needed.  In our case, we have several things that can draw deeply on battery capacity, including a winch and a 2 kilowatt inverter.

My dual battery installation was a “kit”: the Dirty Parts dual battery kit for FJ Cruisers.  This kit comes with everything you need to put a dual battery system in, most especially the mechanical mount – that's something I had zero desire to fabricate myself.  It also comes with the electrical parts, a pre-built cable harness, a gigantic relay, and all the heavy-gauge wire you'll need, already cut, stripped, and lugged.  I also got the optional rocker switch upgrade, as I wanted to mount the switch in one of the empty switch positions in our FJ (and there are lots of these!).  If you want to install a dual battery system in your FJ, I think you'd be absolutely crazy not to get this kit.  It's very well done, the end result looks professional, and Larry at Dirty Parts is right there when you need help (as I did): I was too stupid to figure out how a support bracket was supposed to be installed.  I queried Larry by email, and he very patiently wrote a lengthy reply, explaining in sufficient detail that even a mechanical zero like myself could figure it out.

If you're wondering why there are switches, wires, and relays involved with a dual battery installation (don't you just strap them in parallel?), here's what's going on.  When the relay is not energized, the secondary battery is disconnected from the FJ's electrical system.  This is the mode I'd be running in if I wanted the battery as a backup (presuming I was bright enough to make sure it was charged!).  When the relay is energized, the secondary battery is connected in parallel with the primary battery, providing all the extra oomph you might need.

So what energizes the relay?  That's where the switch comes in.  It has three positions, which I'll call “stock”, “emergency”, and “normal”.  In stock mode, the secondary battery is disconnected and the system behaves exactly as a stock FJ would.  This is how I'd run when I want the secondary battery as backup.  In normal mode, the relay is energized from the ignition circuit, which means (until the relay operates) the primary battery must have enough power to operate the relay.  In emergency mode, the relay is energized from the secondary battery – so even if the primary battery is completely dead, you can still use the secondary battery to do something important, like start the engine.

This is the first “major” mod I've made to the FJ, and it turned into quite a learning exercise.  The most interesting thing I learned was how to take apart the dashboard (so I could run wires to the switch, which is in the center console).  This is much easier than I expected, but it's very tricky – I don't know if I'd ever have figured it out (or had the courage to try!) if it wasn't for the vast amount of information and experience available on the web.  I was able to find other people who had done everything I needed to do, often with photos and detailed guides.  The web is a wonderful place!  I also had to make several modifications to the standard kit, mainly so that I could install the switch in an empty position on the center console.  The biggest modification there was some Dremel tool work on the back of the switch panel, to make the standard panel switch (supplied in the Dirty Parts kit) fit.  The end result is very nice, but I was a bit worried along the way, as bits of melted plastic flew out of my Dremel tool's cutting disc – this mod was not reversible :)

One big mod down, a whole bunch to go!  So far I've mounted a BajaRack with a 7" light bar, mounts for gas cans, Pull-Pal, Hi-Lift jack, shovel, and axe, and a ladder to get up to the roof, a Boztec CB antenna mount (no CB yet, though!), and now the dual battery setup.  Next up: replacing the stock alloy wheels and street tires with steel wheels and offroad tires...

“Port Winston” Mulberry Found!

If you're a student of 20th century history, you probably know all about the vital role of the “Mulberry harbours” in the Allied invasion of Europe in WWII.  After the invasion the Mulberry harbors were largely demolished, though a few pieces remain above water off “Gold Beach” in Normandy. 

Now scientists from the United Kingdom, using sophisticated sonar systems, have located the remains of the “Port Winston” Mulberry harbor, some just 15 feet underwater.

In my travels around Europe (including Eastern Europe), one of the most surprising things to me was just how little directly visible evidence of WWII remains.  After my readings of history, and given how recent WWII was, I fully expected to see direct evidence of it all over the place.  Here's a great example of what I mean – these Mulberry harbours were enormous constructs of concrete and steel, and yet they were completely lost for 69 years!  When I visited Normandy roughly 20 years ago, I was shocked to discover that very little of the massive Nazi defensive works remain, and those only because they were preserved as a monument.  Even in the former Soviet Union it's hard to find remnants, though there are more there than in the West.  For example, on the southwest tip of the island of Saremaa (in the Baltic Sea), there is a largely untouched concrete defensive works, quite large, still remaining – and there are some efforts to preserve what's left.  Most of the iron and steel components of this works have been scavenged, but the concrete bunkers remain.

Curiosity is Back Online!

Hip hip hooray! 

Curiosity has been offline for several weeks, after a software glitch (and possibly a memory failure; reports vary).  The photo at right was returned amongst the first new batch since the glitch first occurred.  It's very nice to see that!  In just over a week, Curiosity (and all of Mars) will be on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, so for a few weeks after that it will be “radio silence” for all the robotic explorers orbiting and sitting on the surface of Mars.  Let's hope they all wake back up successfully when Mars is out of occlusion!

We Aren't the World...

Experiments in psychology and sociology are plagued by uncontrolled (and perhaps uncontrollable) variables and difficulties in replication.  For any engineer or scientist used to the somewhat firmer ground of the “hard” sciences, this makes investigations into human behavior seem like something other than science and closer to opinion.  It doesn't help that facets of these softer sciences that are believed to be true are routinely and frequently overturned. 

On that theme, here's an article exploring one of the more recent such overturnings.  My main reactions after reading this: (1) don't believe anything is actually “known” in those fields, and (2) I'm sure glad my own areas of interest aren't quite so ambiguous and difficult to measure – my oscilloscope and voltmeter work every time, with perfectly repeatable results :)