Month: October 2015

BoringSSL

We recently switched Google’s 2b line repository over to BoringSSL, our fork of OpenSSL. This means that BoringSSL is now powering Chromium (on nearly all platforms), Android M and Google’s production services. For the first time, the majority of Google’s products are sharing a single TLS stack and making changes no longer involves several days of work juggling patch files across multiple repositories. This is a big positive for Google and I’m going to document some of the changes that we’ve made in BoringSSL in this post.

Life 4.1 ga ago

life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 ga ago — 300 ma earlier than previous research suggested. Life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 ga ago, and existed prior to the massive bombardment of the inner solar system that formed the moon’s large craters 3.9 ga ago. If all life on Earth died during this bombardment, then life must have restarted quickly

The yuan %

Fuerdai are to China what Paris Hilton was to the US 10 years ago, only less tasteful. Every few months there’s a fuerdai scandal, whether it’s a photo of a woman about to set fire to a pile of 100-yuan notes; members of the much derided Sports Car Club posing beside their Lamborghinis; or someone pulling a gun during a street race. In 2013 reports of a fuerdai sex party at the beach resort of Sanya provoked a nationwide finger-wag. 2 prominent rich kids got into a public arms race over who had the bigger stash: The widely despised socialite Guo Meimei posted photos online of herself with 5M yuan worth of casino chips; her rival responded with a screen shot of his bank statement, which appeared to contain 3.7M yuan. (Guo was sentenced to 5 years in prison for running a gambling den.) Recently, the son of Wang Jianlin, a real estate mogul and the richest man in China, trolled the nation by posting a photo of his dog wearing 2 gold Apple Watches, 1 on each forepaw. Fuerdai outrages occasionally feature government intrigue, such as a 2012 Ferrari crash in Beijing involving 2 young women and the son of a high-level official, all of whom were at least partially naked when they were thrown from the car. The man’s father, a top aide to then-president Hu Jintao, was later arrested and charged with corruption.

M-42

The sub-basement of Grand Central Terminal is New York City’s deepest basement, at least that’s what they’ll tell you. It’s also likely the safest and one of the most secure places in all of the 5 boroughs. It was never included on blueprints for the building, and its exact location remains confidential to this day. To make it all the more mysterious, the room is called M-42, which sounds like something straight out of The X-Files.

The TI-83 scam

education is even more busted than healthcare and this is a great example why.

TI calculators have been a constant, essential staple in the slow-moving public education sector. Students and teachers are so used to generations of students learning the familiar button combos and menu options that TI provides a computer program that perfectly resembles the button layout of the TI-83.

However, even if teachers wanted to be bold and bring in better technology, they would end up right back at square one because of that infamous force in American education: standardized testing.

Observing protein folding

Proteins convert from one observable shape to another in less than 1 trillionth of a second, and in molecules that are less than 1 millionth of a cm in size. These changes have been simulated by computers, but no one had ever observed how they happen. Apparently ~0.02% get trapped in a highly unlikely shape that is like a single frame in a movie. The set of these trapped residues taken together have basically allowed us to make a movie that shows how these special protein shape changes occur. And what this movie shows has real differences from what the computer simulations have predicted.”

Personalized medicine

Each patient is a unique, dynamic system and at the molecular level diseases are heterogeneous even when symptoms are not. In just the last few years we have expanded breast cancer into first 4 and now 10 different types of cancer and the subdivision is likely to continue as knowledge expands. Match heterogeneous patients against heterogeneous diseases and the result is a high dimension system that cannot be well navigated with expensive, randomized controlled trials. As a result, the FDA ends up throwing out many drugs that could do good.