The Musashi is found!

The Musashi is found!  The wreck of the Japanese super-battleship Musashi (sunk in the WWII Battle of Leyte Gulf) has been found.  A team of researchers funded by Paul Allen found the wreck after eight years of work...

Geek: the evolution of character codes...

Geek: the evolution of character codes...  For an aging geek like me, this paper was a trip down memory lane.  In the '70s, while writing software for Univac computers that were part of the U.S. Navy's NTDS system, I often wrote programs to convert textual data from one character encoding to another.  This was a common problem, as there was no “one standard to rule them all” as there is today with Unicode.  Instead we used a combination of different character encodings, and if we wanted one system or program to communicate with another, we had to write a conversion program to do it.

The character encodings that I worked with included several widely used ones: Baudot, FIELDATA, ASCII, and EBCDIC, all discussed in the linked paper.  We also used some special-purpose, typically application-specific encodings that were basically primitive compression schemes – these were especially common in what we'd call log data today.  For instance, one system I worked on kept a log (on magnetic tape!) of all the targets we had identified and tracked.  Space on that tape was at a premium, so many simple tricks were used to conserve characters.  One that I recall: in an ASCII character stream (5 bits per character), we had a special “numbers-only” mode that was initiated by a control character.  Once in that mode, codes from 0x00 to 0x63 represented decimal digit pairs (00 to 99), and 0x64 dropped us out of that mode.  This was useful because a high percentage of a log was comprised of numbers – so why “waste” an entire ASCII character for just one digit?  If you had a number with 8 or more sequential digits (and we had many of these), this character encoding would save bits.

What a different world with Unicode today!

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  From Josh Bloom, writing at Science 2.0:

The "war on drugs" has been a dismal failure by any measure. Turning cancer patients and others with severe pain into collateral damage in this un-winnable war is inhuman.

I have only suffered from serious pain a couple of times in my life.  On both those occasions, luckily for me, I was easily able to obtain powerful opioid painkillers.   That may not be true, should I need them again – and I, for one, am not looking forward to suffering because of that.

There are many reasons to end the war on drugs, and this is but one of them...

Glasses to treat color blindness...

Glasses to treat color blindness...  For real!  But only certain kinds of color blindness, albeit the most common ones.  These glasses work by blocking particular light frequencies – those sensed by both red and green “cones” (the color-sensitive photo-sensing cells on your retina).  By blocking the common sensitivity, the glasses improve the eye's ability to discriminate between colors.  My favorite part: the effectiveness of these glasses was discovered entirely by accident!

I sure hope they've gotten better...

I sure hope they've gotten better ... than they were when I  was in the Navy (the early '70s).  I was on the USS Long Beach CGN-9 (now decommissioned and sold for scrap), and we had a pair of 5 inch guns on board.  A crew of Marines manned those guns, and we occasionally engaged in some target practice – usually shooting at either towed targets or at stationary targets on small islands off the coast of California.

The ability of our gun crews to miss their target was the stuff of USS Long Beach legend.  We heard stories of ships that would refuse to tow targets for us to shoot at, from the (entirely justified) fear that our guns would hit them instead of the target – no matter how long the towline was.  I remember watching target practice against an island target and seeing shells landing hundreds of yards from their aim point.  From all I could tell, the bad reputation our guns had was well-earned.

I was an enlisted guy, and my living quarters (a “berthing compartment”) was shared with 40 or 50 other technically-oriented enlisted guys (ETs and DSs, for the most part).  Our berthing compartment was right next to the Marines' berthing compartment, and there was a seldom used hatch (door) between the two.  One day after target practice we heard a commotion from the Marines' side.  A couple of us went over to see what the fuss was, and it turned out that a bunch of Marines were delivering some physical justice to the gun crew – for having dishonored the Marine Corps with their bad shooting.

One hopes things aren't quite so bad these days...

Weirder and weirder...

 Weirder and weirder...  The latest episode in the Hillary-didn't-use-government-email saga is an odd twist indeed: the email address she used for official business (hdr22-at-clintonemail.com) was hosted on a private email server.  These days it's pretty darned odd for an individual to go to all the trouble of acquiring, installing, configuring, and maintaining a private email servers.  Even businesses are moving toward hosted email (services like Google's GMail) to save money and the need for expertise.  Often the motive is the realization that email security is hard, and getting harder every day.

So why would Clinton have her own email server?  I don't know the answer to that, of course – but it's darned hard to think of a benign reason for her to do so.  If she was some kind of a geek, I could pass it off as a hobbyist sort of thing – but she's famously not a geek.  The only other motivations I can come up with revolve around a desire for secrecy – which in the case of a government official would be (a) inappropriate, and (b) illegal.

The Clinton machine's response to all this?  It boils down to “Shut up!  You’re talking to the next President of the United States, you insignificant worm!”  How's that for a pleasant thought to start your morning with?

The cure for cyber-bullying...

The cure for cyber-bullying...  A father unmasks some men who made disgusting online comments about his daughter – and suddenly there was an attitude change.  There's an entrepreneurial opportunity here for a nerdy version of the old-fashioned hard-boiled detective...

A pill that provides the benefits of exercise?

A pill that provides the benefits of exercise?  Maybe.  I'll take that as a substitute for the flying car I thought I'd have by now...

First I read a transcript of Netanyahu's speech...

First I read a transcript of Netanyahu's speech ... (here) and I felt a flicker of hope for the free world.  I felt the presence of an adult in the room.  I heard the pride of a patriot defending the country he loves.

And then I read the comments to this piece on the Huffington Post, and all is black and despair again...