Condor's Gut

Hedwig at Living the Scientific Life has an interesting post on the current state of the California Condor. An excerpt about an ailing condor chick:

After transporting the chick to the Los Angeles Zoo, and following a three-hour operation, an astounding amount of material was removed from the ventriculus and proventriculus of the condor chick. The following items were among the debris removed from the chick: 4 bottle caps and a screw top, 3 electrical fittings, 5 washers, 13 22-caliber shell-casings, 1 38-caliber shell-casing, a shotgun-shell, several pieces of plastic bags, about a quarter cup of broken glass and a similar amount of broken plastic, a few small pieces of fabric, 4 small stones, a metal bracket, a piece of wire, and a few small pieces of rubber.

Fortunately, it did not appear that any of this remarkable collection of detritus perforated the gut, and currently the chick appears to be doing well.

The ponder is this: what led the chick's parents to feed it all this junk? Is it just that one of the parents is particularly attracted to shiny things? Or is it a characteristic of the species?

The author of the post (Jerry W. Davis) doesn't answer that question, but he does mention how well, in general, the condors are doing. I may be guilty of over-simplifying the issue here, but ... it seems to me that if the condor recovery is going well, with an increasing population, then ... it's probably true that the condors are not full of shiny metal and glass junk. I hope my logic is correct!

Dumb Ideas

The field of Information Technology (IT) security — part of my work for many years now — is notoriously full of uninformed "experts", snake-oil salesmen, useless (or even harmful) technology, and poor management. In my own experience, the majority of the effort and money poured into "IT security" is completely wasted — or worse, actually causes harm either directly or by diverting resources away from efforts that would actually increase security. For example, I've had bosses demand that we install an extra firewall, but refuse to spend 10% of that cost on educating employees about social engineering attacks. Really dumb.

Marcus Ranum (a well-known figure in the IT security world) has an article called the "Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security". It's an interesting and amusing read. My favorite:

#6) Action is Better Than Inaction

IT executives seem to break down into two categories: the "early adopters" and the "pause and thinkers." Over the course of my career, I've noticed that dramatically fewer of the "early adopters" build successful, secure, mission-critical systems. This is because they somehow believe that "Action is Better Than Inaction" - i.e.: if there's a new whizzbang, it's better to install it right now than to wait, think about it, watch what happens to the other early adopters, and then deploy the technology once it's fully sorted-out and has had its first generation of experienced users. I know one senior IT executive - one of the "pause and thinkers" whose plan for doing a wireless roll-out for their corporate network was "wait 2 years and hire a guy who did a successful wireless deployment for a company larger than us." Not only will the technology be more sorted-out by then, it'll be much, much cheaper. What an utterly brilliant strategy!

There's an important corollary to the "Action is Better Than Inaction" dumb idea, and it's that: "It is often easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart."Sun Tzu didn't really write that in "The Art of War" but if you tell IT executives that he did, they'll take you much more seriously when you counsel a judicious, thoughtful approach to fielding some new whizzbang. To many of my clients, I have been counselling, "hold off on outsourcing your security for a year or two and then get recommendations and opinions from the bloody, battered survivors - if there are any."

Indeed.
Thanks to Bruce Schneier (who doesn't always agree with Marcus) for the pointer...

Wolfram Tones

Stephen Wolfram has published (free, on the web) an application that uses some of his theoretical work to compose music. Not just synthesize a melody that a human wrote, but to actually compose the melody. The application will, on demand, compose new pieces in a specified style, and play them for you or let you download them as a ringtone.

I tried several different settings (there are many), and I was surprised at the results. Nothing I heard smacked of a Top 10 hit or an acclaimed symphony, but...all were at least pleasant to listen to, reminiscent of the requested style, and surprisingly not machine-like. An interesting exploration.

From the WolframTones web site (their "About" page):

When prominent scientist Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, it was immediately hailed as a major intellectual landmark. Today the paradigm shift that Wolfram's work initiated is starting revolutions in a remarkable range of areas of science, technology--and the arts. WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries to the creation of music.

At the core of A New Kind of Science is the idea of exploring a new abstract universe: a "computational universe" of simple programs. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram shows how remarkably simple programs in his "computational universe" capture the essence of the complexity--and beauty--of many systems in nature.

WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story--and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.

It's all original music--fresh from "mining" Wolfram's computational universe. Sometimes it's reminiscent of familiar musical styles; sometimes it's like nothing ever heard before. But from just the tiniest corner of the computational universe WolframTones can make everyone on Earth their own unique cellphone ringtone. It's a taste of what it's like to explore the computational universe--and a hint what's to come...

Tip of the hat to SlashDot.