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Tuesday, August 31, 2004
They're lucky that's all she threw away...
In late June, a janitor noticed a plastic see-through bag full of garbage, which she naturally threw away. Most employers with any sort of standards expect this kind of behavior from their cleaning staff. Unfortunately, this particular janitor was working at the Tate Britain museum in London, where standards don't apply.
It was later discovered (although just recently admitted) that the bag of trash, which was sitting next to a metal sculpture and a sheet of nylon splattered with acid, was meant to be "art."
The refuse was part of the gallery's "Art and the Sixties" show before its fateful trip to the trash compactor. After the bag of trash was recovered from the trash, "artist" Gustav Metzger felt that it had been too badly "damaged" to redisplay and was forced to painstakingly reconstruct a replacement bag of trash. The show must go on, after all.
Although it is often difficult to understand how anyone in the modern art community could possibly take themselves seriously, at least someone at the Tate Britain knows garbage when they see it. Kudos to the janitor for demonstrating once again that modern art really is rubbish.
[Correction: As it turns out, the above post gives Metzger too much credit. He didn't have to "reconstruct" his bag of trash; a museum representative later noted that Metzger simply found a bag of trash somewhere and used that: "The bags are taken from where they are found and put in the [gallery] space...he doesn't manipulate what's in the bag."]
Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Europe is melting...but not soon enough
Americans will have to wait until the year 2080 before Europe finally melts, the European Environmental Agency warned today. According to the agency's first report on climate change, in another seventy-six years the legendary goblin of global warming could claim victory over the rotting continent, having virtually eradicated winters and melted more than three quarters of the Swiss Alps' glaciers.Or not. The EEA report makes judicious use of words like "might," "could," and "may." How scientific.
Citing temperature measurements over the past 100 years, the EEA claims that temperatures in Europe have risen by an average of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit. In an a science fiction novel 100 years of data might be significant, but here on Earth the global climate normally changes over tens of thousands of years. The EEA report failed to mention that the Northern Hemisphere has been covered with ice for 80 percent of the Earth's history, that ice ages typically last a few hundred thousand years followed by 10,000-12,000 year periods of rapid warmth, and that the last ice age ended approximately 11,000 years ago. Why clutter political propaganda with relevant facts?
According to EEA statements, elevated carbon dioxide levels are largely responsible for the anticipated apocalyptic effects of global warming, and the Industrial Revolution is to blame for this (and for the increased life expectancy of those pesky humans). But nature makes modern industry look almost as lazy as one of its union employees: while nature contributes a robust 200 billions tons of carbon dioxide annually to the atmosphere, industry coughs-out a mere 7 billion. When it comes to producing the evil "greenhouse gas," humans are quite obviously slacking-off. In order to meet the 2080 deadline for the melting of Europe, humans everywhere are going to have to step-up production--and fast.
So please: go burn some coal. It's for a good cause.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Add Jesus. Bake at 450 for 20 minutes.
Cool before serving.
While most folks are content to munch on the occasional gingerbread man during the holidays, Christians have always demanded more from their wheat. According to the Catholics, that's where Jesus comes in.
As part of Catholicism's long-held cannibalistic ritual called "communion," member drones periodically "cleanse" themselves by eating their dead savior's flesh (represented by a wafer) and/or drinking his blood (wine).
But when eight-year-old Haley Pelly-Waldman recently performed the primitive ceremony with a rice-based wafer instead of the traditional wheat product, all Hell (apparently) broke loose, and Catholic officials were forced to answer that age-old question:
Just what kind of carbohydrate was the Christ, anyway?
[Sorry, Atkins fans: he was definitely a carbohydrate.]
Pelly-Waldman suffers from celiac-sprue disease: a rare disorder which prevents her from being able to ingest any gluten without serious medical repercussions. Her brain, however, is still capable of ingesting small amounts of Catholicism, provided that she reverse the damage with a transfusion of logic before her cognitive development is complete.
So...what did the Catholic church decide?
Wheat. Jesus Christ, the historical figure upon which all sects of Christianity are based, was made of wheat. Cheap rice substitutes--for whatever the reason--simply will not suffice. So there. And no MSG, either!
Now that the Catholics have decided that, perhaps they will have time to decide to stop buggering little boys.
Monday, August 16, 2004
When good cryptoprimitives go bad:
a collision in SHA-0
For non-crypto folks, "a collision in SHA-0" might sound like nothing more than a chance numerical fender-bender on the esoteric highway of math nerds, but this wreck just may permanently ruin your virtual commute, so listen up.
BACKGROUND: For those readers who don't already know, SHA-1 is the most trusted secure hash algorithm on the planet. A security problem with SHA-1 would mean big trouble for things like digital signatures, which are commonly used to help secure online transactions. SHA-0 is the somewhat less secure predecessor to SHA-1.
At this year's CRYPTO conference in Santa Barbara, Eli Biham and Rafi Chen will present a paper describing a method for finding collisions in SHA-0. On August 12th, using Biham's and Chen's "neutral bit" technique together with previous research, Antoine Joux demonstrated a collision in SHA-0. Scarier still, CRYPTO rumor has it that a collision in SHA-1 will be announced during this year's rump session.
Even if the rumor is true, it won't mean that SHA-1 is completely broken (yet), but it's a very bad sign; when problems like this are discovered, more severe attacks inevitably follow.
In the meantime, keep you powder dry and your hard drive clean.
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