Month: December 2013

Networking Principles

Communications is not an easy science. The math is heavy, and intuition is slow to develop. To complicate things further, the field does not stay put. New concepts are always coming to the fore.

This website offers tutorials I have written on various topics in analog and digital communications that will help you cut through this complexity. I keep adding to this collection, albeit very slowly.

Our field represents a pinnacle of human achievement in applied mathematics. During our engineering education, most of us don’t develop the intuitive understanding of these beautiful ideas. I have tried to make these tutorials as simple as is possible given all the math required. I hope I have been successful in taking you closer to the “aha” mome

Energy futures

much smaller, higher efficiency turbines are coming (a boring but crucial part), and renewables will finally drop below utility cost in ~2 years. that makes large scale grids unsustainable, and will lead to smaller, decentralized plants. which is also great for resiliency.

Best TV ending

On August 21, 2005, the HBO drama 6 Feet Under concluded with a 7-minute montage of flash-forwards revealing how each of the remaining main characters die. The episode, “Everybody’s Waiting,” was immediately hailed as the most satisfying TV ending ever

i never watched the show, but this montage is amazing.

AI Telemarketing

Americans are fielding millions of calls from bright, energetic telemarketers, but what they don’t know is that they’re talking to machines. 99% of the people do not know that the agent just shifted from pre-recorded to a live voice and back to pre-recorded audio. All these different measures are part of making the human-cyborg conversation feel “natural,” even though it is anything but.

the title is just linkbait, and the author had to throw in the obligatory “creepy” (we’re supposed to be scared by recorded voices now? what is this, 1860?), but it is still fairly interesting.

Homophobic Africa

Human rights in many parts of Africa are sadly stuck in the savage stage.

Uganda’s parliament has passed a bill to toughen the punishment for homosexual acts to include life imprisonment in some cases.

the backlash is in the most primitive countries in the world, a side effect of global media.

Yet there are still parts of the world where it is not safe to be homosexual. Extra-judicial beatings and murders are depressingly common in much of Africa and in some Muslim countries. African gangs subject lesbians to “corrective rape”. In some countries persecution has intensified. Chad is poised to ban gay sex. Nigeria and Uganda have passed draconian anti-gay laws (though a court recently struck Uganda’s down). Russia and a few other countries have barred the “promotion” of homosexuality.

This is partly a reaction to the spread of gay rights in the West. Thanks to globalisation, people who live in places where everyone agrees that homosexuality is an abomination can now see pictures of gay-pride parades in Sydney or men marrying men in Massachusetts. They find this shocking.

This is why you can’t have nice things, africa. What is it with Africa and this sort of stuff? It is hard to see how the continent can go anywhere with the medieval times still going strong in the 21th century.

A Zimbabwean senator named Morgan Femai from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change has given a bizarre, misogynist speech at an African HIV/AIDS conference in which he proposes that his county’s AIDS health emergency can be solved by mandating that women must be ugly and unbathed, and be subject to genital mutilation.

backdoors everywhere

the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a back door in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

RSA, despite its august founder, has fallen far, and is now part of the pseudo-security industrial complex, together with all the antivirus companies. first they get 0wned by the chinese and now, for balance, the nsa. unfortunately, unless you know what you’re doing (ie almost no one), you are kind of screwed. sorry.

NYC has too many representatives

i’m with norman mailer but it turns out that

Bills from legislators from small or medium-sized cities were 2x as likely to pass as ones that originated in big cities like Chicago or New York. they found a precipitous drop in the number of bills a city’s delegation was able to pass as the number of representatives ballooned. keeping center-city legislators in line may be just as important as having allies in Albany or Springfield.

Schaft Robotics

“We expect the robots will demonstrate the competence of a 2-year-old child, giving them the ability to autonomously carry out simple commands such as ‘Clear the debris in front of you’ or ‘Close the valve.’ The robots will still need to be told by human operators which tasks to chain together to achieve larger goals, but DARPA’s hope is that this demonstration will show the promise disaster response robots hold for mitigating the effects of future disasters.”

now with more cuddly rescue capability instead of ominous “military applications”