One (master) key to rule them all!

Here are two articles (there are many more) that describe the 'root signing ceremony' for the internets. This ceremony is used to unclog the pipes, as you may already know...

• Business Insider: The internet is still actually controlled by 14 people who hold 7 secret keys
• The Guardian: Meet the seven people who hold the keys to worldwide internet security

If you want more details you can read it an IANA's (internet Assigned Numbets Authority) ceremony page. Also, this page from Cloudflare explains 'How DNSSEC Works.'

Fascinating reading for some of you.

While you're at it, please join me in a round of applause for the individuals who endure a 5+ hour ceremony in close quarters, going over a very tedious list of actions so that you can spend countless hours reading fake articles on facebook.

Cognitive bias codex

Buster Benson (and John Manoogian III, with a little help from their Wikipedian friends) created a cognitive bias codex. The content is very impressive, even tough after studying in a bit, you will realized that resistance is futile (or, 'too much information?'). I may have biased you a bit by saying this, but...

Here is a blog post that goes with this diagram.

Security Schmecurity

Trying to access CNSS (Committee on National Security Systems) web site to read about commercial solutions to protect national security systems (fun reading, i know)...

www.cnss.gov shows me this!

 

Have you seen these articles on global warming?

As you may be well aware of,  'global warming' is making the news more and more frequently. Here is a sample of what we have seen in 2016:

• Washington Post, Jan 2016: 2015 was way worse than 2014. The change/delta/increase in metrics was big, year over year.

• Slate, March 2016: NASA confirms that February 2016 was not only the most unusually warm month ever measured globally, at 1.35 degrees Celsius above the long-term average—it was more than 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer than the previously most unusually warm month ever measured: January 2016.  [Let this one sink in for a minute, will you?]

• National Geographic, June 2016: First Mammal Species Goes Extinct Due to Climate Change

• Independent, Oct 2016:Global warming doubles size of forest fires in US West, NASA [again!] study finds.
  
  
• xkcd: A timeline of earth's average temperature... for a perspective.

 

 

If you think there are other good articles [more data, the better] on this topic, please add them in the comments section.

Epipen price history and breakdown

Mercury News published a great article on price breakdown of Mylan's Epi-pen, which describes the cost of each component in the auto-injector, calculated by Roland Krevitt and Bob Wallace. Before the scandal, two Epi-pen injectors were $608 in a single pack. The price analysis of all the components (case, sleeves, medication, mechanism, etc.) shows that the cost of manufacturing comes down to, wait for it, $8.02 for the package. Click on the image for a link to the article. Manufacture for 8 bucks; sell for $608. Something's not right here. Plus, the same package used to be around $60 few years back. I actually remember buying a pair for about $65 or so in 2009 (before a trip to an area where there were a lot of scorpions). The price of this medication/applicator should have decreased instead of shooting up like this. Here is chart that may explain this pricing behavior: This one is from Forbes and it shows the prices of Epi-Pen and its competition Auvi-Q.

(from Forbes) 

Two competing companies increasing the price of the same medication almost synchronously during multiple years. (For more details, see here). Huh?!

Of course, insurance holders were completely unaware of this price hike; our co-pays hide this fact from us.

New data on KIC 8462852

Following up on KIC 8462852...

Montet and Simon published a manuscript on the irregularities with KIC 8462852. They conclude:

There is no known or proposed stellar phenomenon

that can fully explain all aspects of the observed light

curve. Non-stellar explanations, such as circumstellar

material, o er the best opportunity to provide an expla-

nation for the observed light curve, but simple models

are unable to match the light curve as observed over the

last century. We strongly encourage further refinements,

alternative hypotheses, and new data in order to explain

the full suite of observations of this very mysterious ob-

ject.

Read more here.

Elon Musk at IAC 2016: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species

In case you missed it, SpaceX's Elon Musk's talk titled 'Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species' is below (linked from YouTube). This is an entertaining video, packed with interesting data, lasting an hour:

Here are some random notes, in no particular order:

• 01:13: Talk starts
• Musk is a nerd, and comes off as awkward while speaking. Do not pay attention to the style, listen to him.
• There are some really interesting scientific/engineering data on some of the slides. They are very very cool!
• 8:25: Estimate of an average one-way ticket cost to Mars
• 11:04: Southwest advertisement around
• You gotta love this guy; he mentioned a few times that going to Mars at scale will be a bit 'tricky'.
• 12:10: Discussion on refueling.
• 14:25: Propellant discussion
• 16:55: Simulation of the overall system (a.k.a, movie with extremely high cheese quotient) starts. Make sure you pay attention to the numbers shown.
• Cheesy video? Yes, but you need to listen to what he is going to say around 21:35.
• 23:00: Don't skip slide shown; very interesting re-use numbers on that page.
• 24:36: Size discussion. His comment on size at 23:45 is priceless. 
• And, the comment at 27:03.
• 29:24: Nice comparison of past and current space vehicles on the slide. Pay attention to the last two on the right, and the 'white bars.'
• Engine numbers at 32:30 mark; rocket booster intro at 33:45. 
• There will be 42 engines, folks! Interesting choice of number :)
• 36:42: Raptor engine configuration at the base of booster
• 37:22: Spaceship intro starts.
• 37:43: Musk says that "liquid oxygen tank on the spaceship is probably the hardest piece of the whole vehicle, and [...] they started work on that piece."
• Cool ship capacity chart at 39:42.
• 40:10: "Mars transit times as little as 30 days in the distant future."
• 40:36: Heat shield technology info starts
• 41:15: Fly-thru of the crew compartment. (Smaller version of 'Ascension' ship; needs music.) He claims that the environment on the ship will be really fun. If it is going to be anything like the first Tesla cars, it probably will be.
• 42:47: Details of the propellant plant on Mars.
• 43:22: More details about reuse. New cost number is $140K per ton.
•  44:15: Founding sources!
• 46:35: Timelines (of SpaceX). Don't miss the pictures.
• 48:34: One of the most exciting engineering timeline in the history of human civilization. This is one fast startup!
• 53:09: "Most of our missions (60%) are commeircial geo missions."
• 53:37: Timeline for Mars launches. First development ship in 4 years. Also, potential FedEx killer (54:30 :)
• 56:30: Trying to send Dragon 2 to Mars in a couple of years; another mission in 2020.
•  58:45: Raptor engine vs Merlin; same size, 3 times operating pressure. 
• Producing 300 engines per year!
• 59:00: Raptor firing test video
• 1:00:30: Carbon fiber tank, requirements, production issues and picture (at 1:01:31)
• More cool pictures at 1:02:17 and 1:02:24
• 1:02:44: Beyond Mars! No, no, he is serious! Lotsa cool pictures; he has a plan...

Related:

• Video: First stage landing on drone ship
• Video: Falcon 9 first stage landing on drone ship 
• Video: SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch with Dragon & Successful Landing at Sea
• Gnomes episode of South Park

Full tuition scholarship for a woman seeking a degree in science, engineering, or math

 Yes, a full tuition scholarship for a woman seeking an undergraduate degree in science, engineering, or math. Here is the link:

http://www.scienceambassadorscholarship.org/

Funded by Cards Against Humanity (link may be NSFW). When you buy the 'science extension pack', all profits go to the scholarship.

As of today, the scholarship was close to $1M.

A Neural Network Playground

From tensorflow.org, a beautiful display to show the inner workings of a neural network during learning phase: a neural network playground.

Warning: It may be a bit additive.

Moon landing completely staged! :)

Few nerds at ThamTech, with a little help from others at Wildflower Interactive published this interactive re-enactment (?) of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing:

http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

Looking at the data and the audio, it is very easy to see that the lunar landing was completely staged. Jokes aside, this page is great; I mean great. You can't get any closer to that moment in history than this. Make sure you let kids around you know about this!

By the way, we are obviously very late to the game; this page won an Webby Award in 2013.

Must read: A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

If you want a very quick intro to machine learning (decision trees, specifically), this page has great -I mean, great!- content. Quick read with beautiful visualizations.
A must read for engineers and designers.
 
Don't forget to scroll all the way down to read about Stephanie and Tony.

A Visual Intro to Machine Learning: Part 1

Apollo 11 Code

You probably need to be an uber nerd to think this is cool, but here it is: "Original Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) source code, in assembly, for Command Module (Comanche054) and Lunar Module (Luminary099)", uploaded by Chris L Garry, an intern, to github.

https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/tree/6e8c67f53145375d48d8a1af8f85384d1b10ec51

Smithsonian Magazine article discussion the details is here.

And, to coders who are trying to fix it. This is blasphemy, stop it! That code worked fine :) It was a fairly successful operation that we haven't repeated in the last 50 years. 

Here is a nice page that lets you 'replay' the whole thing, both audio and video. This one is a nerd fest too:

http://www.firstmenonthemoon.com/

New Suite of Solutions to Three-Body problem

After 'discovering' Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem trilogy, I started reading about the original problem and it's solutions. Came across the following article describing a recent set of 13 solution families:

Physicists Discover a Whopping 13 New Solutions to Three-Body Problem

Physicists Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinović at the Institute of Physics Belgrade, discovered 13 new families of solutions to the problem, adding to the 3 families earlier. So far we have:

• Lagrange-Euler family (1800's)
•  Broucke-Hénon family (1970's)
• Figure-eight family (1993)
• Šuvakov-Dmitrašinović suite (2013)

Recent results are described in 'Three Classes of Newtonian Three-Body Planar Periodic Orbits.'

Related:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem#Circular_restricted_three-body_problem
• Animation of latest suite at http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/Suki.html

Water model of Keynesian economics

Rediscovered the 'water model for Keynesian economics' at Nautilus' Facts So Romantic blog, in an article written by Siobhan Roberts.

The nerd in me wants to simulate this in a browser so I can tweak it to see the changes live. Would be a very nice demo for (my) kids.

There has to be a JS library that would make this easy. D3JS maybe?

Nicholas Barr, in A.W.H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective by Robert Leeson

Related:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
• http://www.siobhanroberts.com/genius-at-play/
• http://www.siobhanroberts.com/category/articles/

360 Terabytes for 13.8 billion years

Take that Amazon Glacier! :)

There were multiple articles on a new data storage disk technology sometime in February 2016. It is made of glass and hence can hold data much longer without degradation. Articles mention that "A standard-sized disc can store around 360 terabytes of data, with an estimated lifespan of up to 13.8 billion years even at temperatures of 190°C."

The one-inch discs used to encode new texts in 5D

(Image credit: University of Southampton) 

 Kinda cool... Here are some links:

• http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/16/11018018/5d-data-storage-glass
• http://www.sciencealert.com/this-new-5d-data-storage-disc-can-store-360tb-of-data-for-14-billion-years
• http://phys.org/news/2016-02-eternal-5d-storage-history-humankind.html
• http://www.gizmag.com/eternal-data-storage-nanostructured-glass/41951/

However, I do question the decision by some of the editors to pick an image of the disc that will hold for 13.8 billion years a document that claims that earth is (now only) few thousand years old. The same goes for the researchers who selected the documents for their demonstration.

Adventures in ETH: Buying with BTC

Early last week, I decided to buy a few Ethers (ETH) using Bitcoins (BTC). The plan was to buy a few DAO tokens... Just a simple exercise to learn a bit more about the practicalities of Ethereum and DAO.

Although I consider myself fairly knowledgeable on the Internets and related technologies (Trust me, I am an engineer), I have hit a few stumbling blocks. Here they are, along with few interesting notes, in chronological order. I started on May 16th with a search query 'buying ethereum with bitcoin':

Step 1: Figuring out the currency/exchange to use

It is possible to buy Ethers using a few different currencies/exchanges. I do have few bitcoins in different wallets. One of these wallets is at Coinbase. Based on what I have been reading online, I decided the quickest way would be to transfer bitcoins (BTC) out of Coinbase.

Two exchanges, Kraken and Poloniex are often mentioned as top exchanges for ETH-BTC. I decided to open an account at Kraken and transfer bitcoins from Coinbase.

I was able to open an account and get a verification for Tier 1 (to trade between all currencies, with account funding limited to digital currencies only) fairly fast. This was in May 17th:

At some point, I was entering detailed information since the account is basically an investment account. Interesting fact: I was able to get a verification with my fake online DOB.

Step 2: Figuring out the transfer of Bitcoins

I was new to the Kraken web site, and trying to pull the transfer off with a few minutes to spare, while debugging code. My brain could not handle it (Multi-tasking is a myth!), I could not figure out the steps to transfer bitcoins. (It is pretty straight-forward: Click Funding tab, click Bitcoin on the left side menu, once deposit address shows up, use it to transfer coins, via a. copy/paste, b. QR Code, c. wallet.) Kraken web site is actually pretty decent.

While fiddling with the site, I was also downloading Ethereum Wallet (aka Mist). The installation on Mac was straight-forward, but the wallet refused to sync with other nodes/peers for a very long time.

This is a very common problem, and one quick fix is -sometimes- synching your time server. (Tried to fiddle with my time server settings too. (Multi-tasking while PyCharm open is a myth!) My wallet refused to find any nodes inside my company intranet. (The discussion on opening an IT ticket for blockchain-related apps is ongoing. We actually need these apps to work on some new projects.) But, I was able to sync the wallet from home.

Ethereum-Wallet makes it very easy to deposit Ethers using Bitcoins. Under your account, you will see 'Deposit using Bitcoin' button on the right:

This will popup a window that will let you a. select coins to pay with, b. enter ETH amount, and c. return and email addresses. in the next step you will be shown a Bitcoin address to transfer from the required amount of coins for the number of Ethers you want to buy.

This transfer is "Powered by ShapeShift.io." Your bitcoins will be transferred to their account and then Shift will transfer correct amount of Ethers (minus the fee in Bitcoins) to your Ethereum wallet address.

From Coinbase (or your Bitcoin wallet, etc), transfer the exact number of Bitcoins shown on the page. When you transfer the coins successfully (this is usually very fast), the first step will be completed. As soon as the transfer is done, and you transfered the exact number of Bitcoins shown on the window (no rounding, just copy/paste the BTC's shown to your transfer form), Ethereum transfer should also complete in a few seconds.

It took yours truly a few days to complete this transfer. :)

I was clever; I first transfered 2 Ethers to test the system. Seamless transaction... Then I decided to transfer some more Bitcoins to Ether. I restarted the same process. For some reason, instead of copy/pasting the 2.143245267 BTC, I either typed or rounded off the number. (Multi-tasking while debugging JS code is also a myth!) This blocked the transfer, no Ethers on the wallet for hours. However, Coinbase showed Bitcoins were transfered.

Hundreds of confirmations on https://btc.blockr.io/tx/info/, but nothing on https://etherscan.io/. My bitcoins went into ether! [Yep.]

Contacted support at ShapeShift. and my error was highlighted in a email from ShapeShift support. Solution: They transfered the Bitcoins back to my Coinbase wallet. Fast and easy... I retransferred Ethers to my Ethereum Wallet the same day in a few seconds.

Two interesting notes about this 'botched' transaction...

Step 3: Figuring out the refund

Obviously, getting a refund for this botched transfer was easy. The proof that I have successfully transfered 2.14 Bitcoins to ShapeShift's account was cast in stone... err.. in blockchain.

Step 4: Figuring out the coins and taxes

The refund was painless, but I realized the pains I may have incurred for next April's tax filing. My wallet shows a transfer of 2.14 bitcoins on May 19th to an account. On May 24th, the same account received 2.14 bitcoins. If Bitcoin is treated like any other investment (i.e., stocks) by IRS, are there any tax implications? Did I just have a wash sale?

Assuming FIFO, by transferring BTC's to another account (to get ETH), I did I sell them at a loss. Now that I get a 'substantially identical' amount of BTC back under 30 days, does my 19th transaction qualifies as a wash sale? The fact that Coinbase shows $ amounts next to each transaction tells me this could be the case.

All IRS will see is transfer of bitcoins to my account. I may or may not have received/sent money for these transactions, it is not clear from this data. I will assume these two are canceling each other (i.e., 24th is a refund) and file the loss for the transaction after the refund. My boss tells me he will visit me in jail.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you followed these steps and are using Ethereum Wallet on your computer, your 'money' is now in your wallet on your computer. Make sure you data is properly backed up. If you can't handle the stress, transfer your Ethers to Kraken or similar for safe keeping.

Step 5: Figuring out what this is all about

Blockchains, wallets, different currencies with different features are very hard for average human to grok. All these technologies are designed for enabling computers to carry out transactions, create organizations and trade/transact seamlessly. All these are just another step toward singularity. :)

Related:

• What is Ether?
• How to buy Ethereum?
• ETH-BTC markets from CryptoCompare

Göbekli Tepe

National Geographic introduced Göbekli Tepe in 2011. Most of us probably missed that one. Recently, more articles are coming out about this site in South East Turkey (just a few miles north of Syria). According to National Geographic, the site is to be restored.

What makes this site important? It happens to be the oldest known monument in the history of humanity. How old, you ask? The "elaborately carved stones and distinctive, T-shaped pillars are more than 12,000 years old"

Let's repeat that again; "older than 12 thousand years." That is way older than pyramids; even 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. The pillars in the monument are carved out of stone during a time when humans did not have any tools, or so we thought...

Göbekli Tepe is actually forcing archeologists to make 'adjustments' to what we have known about human civilization's evolution.

Related: Wikipedia on Göbekli Tepe

New robot from Alphabet company

A Japanese branch of Alphabet introduced a new robot. Here is a video:

For comparison, here is a video of the robot created by another branch that Alphabet is trying to divest. 

I understand that Boston Dynamics has military connections (to say the least), but... But...

 Can somebody push the Schaft robot with a stick please?

And, there were (or are, or will be) aliens..

Phys.org recently published an article that asks if 'we are alone' in the universe. It describes a recent astrobiology manuscript by Adam Frank of University of Rochester and 'Woody' Sullivan of University of Washington.

Here is a link to arxiv copy.

It is a slightly different take on Drake's Equation. Using the recent discovery of multiple exoplanets as a starting point, they try to find an answer to the question: "Do/did/will any other advanced technological civilizations exists/ed?"

From the abstract... "We address the cosmic frequency of technological species. Recent advances in exoplanet studies provide strong constraints on all astrophysical terms in the Drake equation. Using these and modifying the form and intent of the Drake equation, we set a firm lower bound on the probability that one or more technological species have evolved anywhere and at any time in the history of the observable Universe."

Their calculations lead to the following: "We find that as long as the probability that a habitable zone planet develops a technological species is larger than ∼10⁻²⁴, humanity is not the only time technological intelligence has evolved. This constraint has important scientific and philosophical consequences."

'Anywhere and at any time' relaxation aside, it looks like there is/was/will be more than one civilization in the known universe if the probability of technological species on a goldilocks planet is greater than 0.000000000000000000000001. Note that earth had at least one that did not reach technological level (dinosaurs) and just one that did (although sustainability is in question :).

Related: Fox News chat with Dr Frank.

Laniakea Supercluster

In case you weren't aware (like me) of the recent change in the map of our local universe...

Laniakea supercluster containsour galaxy the Milky Way, and 100,000 other nearby galaxies. Let's read that last number again: one hundred thousand (galaxies).

It looks like this:

Here is the link to the article from 2014 that introduced the idea:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html

And, here is an image of other nearby superclusters:

Tay

Let's just say that second half of March 2016 was an interesting month for artificial intelligence unleashed on the internets.  Microsoft's Tay was turned on, then under 24 hours, off, due to... bad teaching?

Apparently, it/she was turned on by mistake a few days later and picked up where she left off briefly :)

Too many articles to list.

Looking forward to next version.

Bitcoin dashboard

Recently discovered 'Coin Dance' web site. It lists bitcoin nodes, block info, market cap, etc.
(I did not realized that Ethereum was at $1B market cap). Nice dashboards to read...

Don't forget to hover over the link at the bottom of their page and send them a few bucks, err, microcoins.

DL4J vs. Torch vs. Theano vs. Caffe vs. TensorFlow

May not be unbiased, but still a decent list with a great deal of useful links.

'DL4J vs. Torch vs. Theano vs. Caffe vs. TensorFlow' from deeplearning4j.org.

A short and sweet manuscript on Paillier Crypto system

While searching the interwebs for some quick info on Paillier encryption scheme, I came across the following manuscript. It probably includes everything you need to get acquainted with this crypto system.

http://www.tcnj.edu/~hagedorn/papers/CapstonePapers/OKeeffe/CapstoneOKeeffeCryptography.pdf

When you look at the Github repos for related code samples, e.g.:

• https://github.com/mhe/jspaillier for JavaScript
• https://github.com/mikeivanov/paillier for Python

You will need some of the key points mentioned in this paper. For example, 'powers of (1+n)' topic will come in very handy.

"Absolute horror of WiFi light switches"

An article titled 'absolute horror of WiFi light switches' from Terrence Eden. It is an interesting article on hardware and software issues that you may face when installing a specific light switch with IoT capabilities. Must read... Must read now if you are a bit paranoid about IoT.

R vs Python

A comprehensive info-graphic on 'R versus Python':

NASA's free 'Visions of the Future' posters

Check out JPL's 'Visions of the Future' page. Download, print and post!

I personally like the style; most of them look like 60's Sci-Fi book cover. One below is probably my favorite (so far): 

By the way, have you visited NASA's main page recently? You should!

Human Face of Big Data

It is a web site, a documentary, a book and an (iPad) app. Check it out; you will end up spending a significant chunk of your day.

Physics, Math and Pi

Tamar Friedmann and Carl R. Hagen,  ar University of Rochester, recently published a manuscript titled 'looked at 'Quantum Mechanical Derivation of the Wallis Formula for π'.'

They have been looking at the variational computation of the spectrum of the hydrogen atom. They start with Schrödinger equation for the hydrogen atom, given by:

H . ψ  =  ( - h².∇² / 2.m  -  e² / r) . ψ  =  E . ψ

and arrive at the famous pre-Newtonian formula for pi, derived by John Wallis in 1655.

360 years after a mathematical derivation of pi, physicists come up with a physical derivation for quantum energy levels that is identical to it. The universe never fails to amaze.

Two pages from the book "Arithmetica Infinitorum," by John Wallis. In the table on the left page, the square that appears repeatedly denotes 4/pi, or the ratio of the area of a square to the area of the circumscribed circle. Wallis used the table to obtain the inequalities shown at the top of the page on the right that led to his formula. Credit: Digitized by Google.

Here are some related links:

• Phys.org article
• Forbes/Science article

Engineering Ethics

Nice article about engineering ethics from Kaiser Fung.

[tl;dr] When Fung reviewed the curricula of data science and analytics degree programs last year, he found only one school that requires an ethics class. That needs to change, or more data scandals will emerge.

KIC 8462852 Redux

There are more interesting news (?) on KIC_8462852 or Tabby's Star this week.

Murthy Nukala posted this, pointing to Phil Plait's article describing latest data (from 1890's :) with a link to the Bradley E. Schaefer's manuscript.

So, what's new? The star in question may have been fading in brightness over a time period of 100 years. What exactly this means? Read more by clicking above links. Nothing conclusive so far, but I am telling you, they are coming :)

 (Graph from Schaefer, 2016)

Also, Wow! Signal Podcast released a new episode titled 'The Slow and Fast Dimming of Tabby's Star' on Jan 14th with Dr. Schaefer. You can listen to him reviewing and commenting on the data.

Again, Dr. Boyajian et al's manuscript that started it all is here.

One-Key form Milwaukee Tools

Milwaukee tools introduced a new system called One-Key that enables users to control, track and manage tools wirelessly.

X-files worthy intro video is below. Visit Milwaukee site for details.

We put a chip in it!

If you are interested in or working on IoT projects, you may also be interested in this tumblr site 'We put a chip in it!' Some of the videos are really funny; potential NSFW content.

We put a chip in it!

In some cases, you will find yourself wondering if the video is a legitimate product pitch or a spoof. There are a few that are very hard to tell :)

(Lifted from tumblr)

A new gadget for gluten sensitive people

This gadget from 6SensorLabs was one of the interesting consumer technologies that was presented during CES and the winer of TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield.

It quickly analyses the food you have ordered/presented and tells you if it contains gluten.