A request to members of the press: please quit using “militant” as a euphemism for “terrorist”. It just doesn’t work: by the normal usage of the English language, that isn’t even remotely what “militant” means. In normal usage, one might speak, for instance, of the militant members of Churchill’s cabinet, who wanted to impose sanctions on Japan, or of the militant members of the United Auto Workers, who wanted to go on strike. In neither case are these people who blow up women and children. Members of Churchill’s cabinet might risk war, and innocents might end up getting blown up as part of that war, but blowing them up isn’t the chief tactic or even something that will necessarily happen at all. Likewise, union violence has sometimes gotten ugly, but the accusation of ugly violence is in no way implied when one talks about “militant” union members. (If you screw up the language enough, in future it might be, but it isn’t now.) Even talking about “militant Islam” doesn’t yet imply that one is talking purely about terrorists, or even just about physically violent people: some aggression is implied, but it need not be physical; it might just be “lawfare”.

Ross Anderson’s book Security Engineering (the second edition of which is now available online for free) is generally quite good; but it’s still possible to tell, from the varying quality of the chapters, which subjects he personally has a lot of experience with. One of these is banking; his chapter on banking security is extraordinarily good. It even explains the reason for double-entry bookkeeping.

It almost seems to be a rule: any time anyone talks about “cyber-“anything, it’s bullshit. I have little idea why. Maybe the word “cyber” appeals to people who read too much bad 1970s science fiction? But whatever the reason, from the heady dotcom bubble era talk of “cyberspace”, to today’s paranoid talk of “cybersecurity”, it’s bunk when looked at in detail. There are serious things to discuss, but somehow serious people use different words: “computer security”, for instance, or “network security”. The “cyber-“people are not all wrong – being 100% wrong is almost as hard as being 100% right – but there’s enough wrong to make them not worth taking seriously.

A couple of years ago, I went looking for an RSS reader. For those not familiar with the concept, an RSS reader is a piece of software that maintains a list of blogs, pulls their RSS feeds, and displays a list of articles in them. And, if the blog maintainer puts the full text of his articles in the feed, it lets you read them. A decent RSS reader also remembers which articles you’ve read, and either marks them accordingly or only shows you the new ones. For subscribing to blogs that are only occasionally updated (like this one), an RSS reader is almost a necessity: it does the boring work of repeatedly checking for new articles when there seldom are any.

A couple of quick tips for improving the way the web looks under Linux:

When I first read Shannon’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, one set of numbers particularly jumped out at me: the numbers for the difference between the error rate of a communications channel and the rate at which information is lost from it. I recently ran into a free link to the paper (in a blog post by Federico Pereiro), which reminded me of it. As Shannon explains the issue:

Bread right out of the oven has a taste that beats most anything that can be bought in a store. Even in stores that sell bread baked on the same day, it has usually been sitting around for hours. But baking one’s own bread is generally a hassle. Bread machines make it much easier, but like all machines, they aren’t quite as easy to deal with as one first imagines. They take up space; they sometimes break; they have to be cleaned. (The one I once owned featured an impeller that had to be dug out of the bottom of each loaf.) Nonstick surfaces make cleaning easier, but don’t entirely eliminate it.

Christopher Montgomery (“Monty”) recently posted an excellent argument against distributing music in 192 kHz, 24-bit form, as opposed to the usual 44.1 kHz (or 48 kHz), 16-bit form. I think, however, that many of the people who are inclined to doubt this sort of thing are going to doubt it at a much more fundamental level than the level he’s addressed it at. And I don’t just mean the math-phobic; I know I would have doubted it, once. For years, and even after finishing an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, I wondered whether speaking of signals in terms of their frequency content was really something that could be done as glibly and freely as everyone seemed to assume it could be. It’s an assumption that pervades Monty’s argument – for instance, when he states that “all signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling”. If you don’t believe in speaking of signals in terms of their frequency content, you won’t know what to make of that sentence.

The book Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, is widely recommended to those wishing to know about the US political system. Personally, I tried to read it at one point, but found it boring, and only got through fifty pages or so. Yet I devoured from cover to cover Tocqueville’s later book The Old Regime and the Revolution, about pre-revolutionary France. It’s a much better book, in a lot of ways.

The placebo effect is well known for interfering with medical experiments. It’s not just that if you tell patients that a drug is going to have an effect they tend to believe it has had that effect. It’s that it tends to actually have that effect, when measured by objective measures such as blood tests. Thus the use of double-blindness in experiments, where not only the patients but also the doctors dealing with them have no idea whether they’ve been given the active drug or a placebo. Something about wishing really does make it so, somewhat, when it comes to health; the placebo effect is not just in patients’ minds but also in their bodies.