Bopit Robot
I didn’t even realize the old Bop-It toy had an ending. The original edition ended after a maximum score of 100. The second edition went up to 200 points.
Getting ready to believe
This song is amazing – and perfect for Easter.
Conspiracy vs reality
The internet is just now becoming aware that many new cars have cameras that watch you. Everyone is ascribing this to insurance companies, government control, and so forth.
The reality? This was mandated under the Biden administration and the EU for all new cars to have drowsiness detection systems in all cars. One of the solutions car manufacturers have found is to point a bunch of cameras at you and do gaze detection.
If people are freaking out about this, wait until they hear that all cars and trucks starting in 2026 must have passive drunk driving testing systems before you can start the car – a law which is ironically being defended by alcohol companies. Can you guess why?
AI’s pursuit of Trackmania’s records
Yosh has been covering the increasing use of AI to test for better and faster racing times for track A01. The conclusion: AI was able to bet the human world record, but is still lagging the hand-tuned TAS (tool assisted speedrun). They’re not done trying yet – we’ll have to watch and see how many more records fall to AI and which do not.
Steve Jobs and Elon Musk
I also heard this from another person that worked directly with Steve Jobs. Fascinating comparison with Elon Musk as well.
1992 Sneakers connection to real cryptography
The 1993 movie Sneakers (currently free on Youtube) is one of my favorite movies. It has an amazing cast and one of the better soundtracks I’ve run across. It is one of the first great movies about hackers – and it’s largely very accurate for the 90’s era technology. Back when phone phreaking, cracking and copying games, pirate BBS boards, satellite TV hacking, building computer viruses, and breaking into early computer systems was all the rage.
One of the scenes in the movie involves a mathematician talking about large number theory in relation to cryptography. I took such a grad course on cryptography at Purdue back in the 90’s; and remember listening to his prattle about Artin maps, prime factorization, and a possible breakthrough of Gaussian proportions. Little did I know, however, his little diatribe and the slides were written by no other than Leonard Adleman – a 2002 Turing Award winner – as one of the creators of RSA encryption.
He recounts his interaction with Larry Lasker who approached him to consult on the movie and write the scene. Here Adleman shares his memories:
He told me that there would be a scene wherein a researcher would lecture on his mathematical work regarding a breakthrough in factoring – and hence in cryptography. Larry asked if I would prepare the slides and words for that scene. I liked Larry and his desire for verisimilitude, so I agreed. Larry offered money, but I countered with Robert Redford – I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet Redford.
I worked hard on the scene. The “number field sieve,” (the fastest factoring algorithm currently known) is mentioned along with a fantasy about towers of number fields and Artin maps. I was tempted to name the new breakthrough the “function field sieve,” — since I was actually working on a paper at the time which would later appear with that title – but I decided against it, for reasons which escape me now.
I made beautiful slides on my Mac. This took a great deal of time (graphics programs were not as user friendly as they are now) but I wanted the stuff to look impressive. As it turns out, Larry had them redrawn by hand by some guy on his crew – he said that hand drawn slides looked more realistic. Of course he was right – but I could have saved a lot computer time had I known in the first place.
Len Adleman
Simplicity
‘Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things’
Isaac Newton
Making a core memory USB drive
Despite the drawbacks and impractical nature of this device, space science researcher @dyd_Nao created a USB drive made of magnetic core memory – a technology that was used a lot in space technology of the 1950’s and 60’s.
It’s really awesome – despite the fact it only holds 128 bytes of data and is the size of a small dinner plate.
VGA programming
Ah, the good old days of using INT 10h, AH=0x00 graphics modes to write directly to video memory at 0xA0000/0xB0000/0xB8000 (depending on the mode).
Nir Lichtman walks us through some of the things I was teaching myself in middle school – writing VGA graphics in assembly (often using the great book Programmer’s Guide to the EGA and VGA Cards by Ferraro, Richard F.
I even wrote my own (terrible) little paint program that would then save the buffer into a file and reload it. What good times!
Jon Krakauer Time Capsule
Jon Krakauer is probably most famous for his book Into Thin Air that covered his first-hand experience of the 1996 Everest Disaster, but he also wrote tons for Outside magazine.
What’s interesting about this talk is his description of the climbing and outdoor world of the late 80’s and early 90’s. It is interesting how much of a different world it was back then. This kind of 90’s era spirit of adventure is what got me into Mazamas and climbing in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000’s. I remember it well. It was a very idealistic time in which people talked about the purity of pushing yourself in climbing. Portland saw famous climbers come through town semi-regularly as they practice on the peaks in the Pacific Northwest and to do talks – as mini-celebrities.
Climbing of that era was almost a religion that saw young, incredibly talented and athletic people from everyday backgrounds flying around the world to the most remote locations when the world was much less accessible as it is today.
It’s a great little time capsule of an era that’s largely gone and morphed more into a world of social media celebrities checking off peak boxes for selfies and followers.