News - Neil Armstrong, Lions, Car security

[jack]

Neil Armstrong got it right

I'm sure most of you have come across this by now. A scientist has examined the recording of Neil Armstrong and concluded he *did* say "One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind". The Language Log has an extended discussion about how accurate it is -- I didn't bother to read it, but they're probably right whatever they said.

Of course, I was brought up with the "Small step for man" phrase, so in my head it's firmly lodged as an idiom no more strange than many others dotting English. Mankind lands on the moon for the first time exactly once ever -- whatever you said then is just what you always say in that circumstance, by definition :)

De Bruijn sequences

There was a short flurry a week or so ago with several people rederiving De Bruijn sequences. Ie. the shortest sequence of digits (or set of M characters) that contain every possible sequence of four (or N) digits. It's easy to show this length is 10^4+3, but not so easy to prove that.

And apparently, people are still producing locks to which this is a good attack, link borrowed from Schneier. It's good, because if you get the first digit wrong you don't have to work out how to reset it, an annoying feature of some combination door locks. But bad if someone can hold the sequence in their head and divide the length of a brute force attack by N.

Pride of lions discover they can hunt elephants

The office kitchen has the Times, amongst others, mysteriously appearing every day. I was heartened to see the front page pictures were from an article in one of the supplements that I found interesting, but didn't think anyone else considered front page news.

Black and white infra-red pictures of a pride of lions bringing down an elephant. They are disturbing but evocative.

The front page (and front website) also had a couple of other articles worth commenting on:

EU court upholds right of employers to base pay on length of employment, indirectly paying less to mothers who take maternity leaves

I'm sure some people will have strong opinions about this. I'm not sure what to say. I automatically feel I'm supposed to disagree with it. But paying based on experience at all is probably too entrenched to overturn so easily, and isn't an unreasonable approximation, other metrics have great problems too. And if so, then you see the point.

Of course, preemptively not hiring women, or preemptively paying women less, or denying pay/opportunities to returning mothers more than the time they *have* worked, understandable or not, *should* be classed as discrimination and protected against.

And of course, we all think in terms of our lives. My mother really started her career after I was at school, when computers had conveniently become ubiquitous :)

One quote made the nice point, if only men took equal paternity leave, everything would be hunky-dory :)

Pope oxmoronically abolishes limbo

Pope officially rejects limbo. Specifically for unbaptised babies, who are now supposed to go to heaven -- the official fate of noble savages may be unclear.

People who know my interaction with religion will be unsurprised to realise I'm disappointed in the uncertainty surrounding such things, and I always feel everyone should have had a clear idea of if there is such a thing or not, and why they think that, and what might persuade them to change their mind.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Indeed, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's best not to. Are men specialised for hunting? It seems likely. Yet nowadays we find programming a more useful persuit overall anyway. We might well find many advantages to sharing childcare more, even if women still do the feeding before weaning.