Category: Random

I had lunch with Cal, which isn’t unusual. I’m always having lunch with Cal. Like almost every day. Today – on the way back to the office – we saw poster after poster for filmic obsession Donnie Darko – flyposters, mainly. I peeled it from the side of a phone booth and stuck it on my chest as we walked down the street. It’s by my desk now.

I’m so excited I may well burst. The net’s full of Darkorama at the moment – from the thread on Barbelith. to the audiogalaxy article, right through to the find out which Donnie Darko character you are quiz. I should get paid for the amount of promotion I’m doing for this film. If you’re out there 20th Century Fox, I still really need an iBook.

And four days after I e-mailed pretty much everyone at Salon about the appalling lack of journalistic skill evident in the repeated mis-spelling of “Labour” (the political party, not the noun) in their transcript of Bill Clinton’s speech in Blackpool, they still haven’t fixed it. Here are some examples again:

“Bill Clinton electrifies a British Labor Party conference with a more sweeping vision for global peace and progress than the current president has been able to muster.”

“Former President Bill Clinton delivered the following remarks before the Labor Party Conference in Blackpool, England, on Wednesday.”

“New Labor, this government, has not allowed that dichotomy to occur in Great Britain. “

But if you look carefully, someone’s got it right in the caption of the image at the top of the page – “Former President Clinton speaks at the Labour Party annual conference in Blackpool, England, Wednesday”. If you would like to remind the news team of Salon that basic fact-checking remains an important part of their jobs, then feel free to e-mail: news@salon.com, Joan Walsh, Ed Lempinen, Eric Boehlert, King Kaufman or Michelle Goldberg.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know precisely which Members of Parliament didn’t bother to respond to their constituents? Like – say you ran a service that helped people fax their MP, and you added a feature that let people say if they’d had any response fourteen days afterwards… And then you collated it into a big table of performance data? And then you found Iain Duncan Smith, Peter Mandelson and Boris Johnson at the bottom of it? Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Empire reviews Donnie Darko: “On a shadowy, non-existent street in Weirdsville, USA, first-time writer-director Richard Kelly lives next door to David Lynch and Greg Araki. In order to keep up with the neighbours, he has crafted his own magnificently bizarre hybrid of suburban paranoia and apocalyptic teen angst… Although this feature debut is a little lighter and less artfully obscure than David Lynchís best work, Donnie Darko is nevertheless a mini-masterpiece that marks the arrival of brave new talents in Gyllenhaal and Kelly. Cult glory surely beckons. Five Stars.”

The TV show’s up before the site is, although it seems the site is appearing before my eyes. I’ve only watched about half an hour of it – I mean, proper television came on and I had to turn over. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Fame Academy has come to television. And already I have a favourite, Ainslie is a fluffy little star in the making. Although he can’t dance for shit.

Is it insulting? Probably not. Is it frustrating? Very definitely. Bill Clinton has given a speech to the Labour party conference in Blackpool – and it’s a good speech. A bloody good speech. So good, in fact, that it’s been transcribed completely for Salon.com. But all through the transcription, one thing sticks out like a journalistic sore thumb. Time and time again, the article changes the name of the British left from the “Labour” party to the Americanised “Labor”. It’s probably been done with a spell-checker by some half-arsed intern, but still… It’s unforgiveably bad journalism, laughably poor sub-editing, and atrocious proof-reading. Is it any wonder that people think America is insular and isolationist, if major press institutions can’t even be bothered to put in the ten seconds of effort it would take to spell the name of our governing party properly? If I could find an e-mail address, I’d send in a complaint.

Not the World’s Funniest Joke: An Alsatian went to a telegram office, took out a blank form and wrote: “Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof.” The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: “There are only nine words here. You could send another Woof for the same price.” “But,” the dog replied, “that would make no sense at all.”

I’ve been fascinated with cryptography since I first used PGP – and more fascinated still since Cryptonomicon explained to me how cryptography worked. I’ve never read a book that gave me more information on contemporary cryptographical techniques – which is probably why it was classed as a munition for a while in the US (and therefore couldn’t be exported).

Today there’s an article on BBC News (Light Holds Key to Uncrackable Codes) which reveals that significant progress has been made on Quantum Cryptography – the most significant benefit of which is that if a decryption key is intercepted, then the act of observation changes it. This means that it’s immediately apparent to the ‘legitimate’ parties that the key should be changed.

But to a certain extent, the article confuses me. I had assumed that most people and governments would be using some variation on public key encryption. This kind of encryption works on the assumption that it’s much easier to multiply numbers together to provide a huge key than it is to work out from that key what numbers were multiplied together. Because factoring is so difficult mathematically, it’s also pretty much the holy grail of contemporary cryptanalysis.

With public key encryption, each person has two keys – a public one that can be disseminated freely which is used to encode messages that can subsequently only be decrypted by the private key. Think of it this way – the process of encrypting is like the process of multiplying together two large prime numbers – quite easy. But the process of decryption is like trying to work out what those original numbers were – a process which takes such a huge amount of computer time that it’s functionally impossible to figure out (without the private key). Which such a system there’s no benefit in keeping the public key secret, and no reason to circulate the private one. So I suppose I’m curious as to the benefits of Quantum Cryptography in it’s current form. Quantum Cryptanalysis, on the other hand….

When plasticbag.org went kottkesque (which I somehow insist on pronouncing kot-key-esk rather than the more plausible kot-kesk) I was concerned that I’d be taken apart for being unoriginal, or for even stealing his design. But at the same time I felt comfortable asserting that, after considerable thought, the design of kottke.org was simply the most elegant solution to the formatting of weblogs. And now it seems to be catching on: Gas Giant reveals upcoming design…

I’ve been exploring MIT’s OpenCourseWare site – a collection of full lecture notes, exams and assignments which allow you to be trained in a number of MIT undergraduate courses. At the moment, two courses particularly interest me – Problems of Philosophy (very much in the Anglo-American tradition, but interesting nonetheless) and the rather more challenging Laboratory in Software Engineering, which I suspect would be utterly beyond me. There isn’t a huge range of courses online yet, but I have a feeling this could be an extremely significant and important move that really has the potential to empower and educate people.