Category: Uncategorized

Inferior Copies

It was a brilliant idea: Buy the original, then commission and sell forgeries. It almost worked

To make sure he couldn’t be caught, Ely Sakhai bought the original first—a Rembrandt of enormous value. This “incredibly brazen” con almost worked, writes Anthony M. Amore. The authenticity of his Rembrandt, The Apostle James, was not questioned. Nor was the fact that it was purchased by Ely Sakhai from a reputable source. So when he would offer what he purported to be the painting for sale, it didn’t raise questions about authenticity, if only because those interested in the painting perhaps failed to imagine the nefarious scheme of the seller. Thanks in large measure to his travels in the Far East with his wife, Sakhai made it his mission to establish a steady clientele in Tokyo and Taiwan too. and in June 1997, he sold his Rembrandt to the Japanese businessman and art collector Yoichi Takeuchi.

Learning to Speak Lingerie

Valentine’s Day is one of the few times of the year when most China Star customers are male. Usually, it’s only women in the shop, and often they buy the lightweight, form-fitting dresses that Chinese dealers refer to as suiyi, or “casual clothes.” No Upper Egyptian woman would wear such garments in public, but it’s acceptable at home. This is one reason that the market for clothing is so profitable: Egyptian women need 2 separate wardrobes, for their public and their private lives. Usually, they also acquire a 3rd line of clothing, which is designed to be sexy. The 2 women in niqabs quickly found 2 items that the sheikh approved of: matching sets of thongs and skimpy, transparent nightgowns, 1 in red and the other in blue. The sheikh began to bargain with Chen Yaying, who runs the shop with her husband, Liu Jun. In Egypt, they go by the names Kiki and John, and both are tiny—Kiki barely reached the sheikh’s chest. She’s 24 years old but could pass for a bookish teen-ager; she wears rectangular glasses and a loose ponytail. “This is Chinese!” she said, in heavily accented Arabic, holding up the garments. “Good quality!” She dropped the total price to 160 pounds, a little more than $20, but the sheikh offered 150.

DNA memory

When stored on most conventional storage devices—USB pens, DVDs, or magnetic tapes—data starts to degrade after 50 years or so. DNA could hold data error-free for millennia, thanks to the inherent stability of its double helix and Reed-Solomon codes. If kept in the clement European air outside their laboratory in Zurich, they estimate a ballpark figure of around 2000 years. But place these glass beads in the dark at -18C, the conditions of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, and you could save your photos, music, and eBooks for 2M.

and using CRISPR to store movies:

We use the CRISPR–Cas system to encode the pixel values of black and white images and a short movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria. In doing so, we push the technical limits of this information storage system and optimize strategies to minimize those limitations. They also uncover underlying principles of the CRISPR–Cas adaptation system, including sequence determinants of spacer acquisition that are relevant for understanding both the basic biology of bacterial adaptation and its technological applications. This work demonstrates that this system can capture and stably store practical amounts of real data within the genomes of populations of living cells.

another approach:

Roswell is bringing the $100 genome that can scale rapidly and also deliver Exabyte data storage.

Security Practices

We report on the results of 2 online surveys — 1 with 231 security experts and 1 with 294 MTurk participants­ — on what the practices and attitudes of each group are. Our findings show a discrepancy between the security practices that experts and non-experts report taking. For instance, while experts most frequently report installing software updates, using 2-factor authentication and using a password manager to stay safe online, non-experts report using antivirus software, visiting only known websites, and changing passwords frequently.

Jamestown

Yesterday, the Jamestown Rediscovery and the Smithsonian Institution announced that they had identified the remains of Capt. Gabriel Archer, Rev. Robert Hunt, Sir Ferdinando Wainman and Capt. William West, 4 of the earliest leaders of the Jamestowne settlement. Among Archer’s remnants was a small silver box that researchers have identified as a Roman Catholic reliquary.

Watching Sandra Bland

The Texas state trooper threatening to use his Taser on Sandra Bland (a driver he’d pulled over for the infraction of failing to signal when she changed lanes), shouting “I’m going to light you up!” Without the Garner video, there would have been eyewitnesses but no seemingly incontrovertible testimony. Without the camera on Officer Brian Encinia’s dashboard, most of us might never have heard what happened to Sandra Bland. The existence of such evidence helps in investigations and prosecutions; it’s supposed to be a deterrent to both bad behavior on the part of the cops and false allegations of police abuse. But it does not guarantee either better behavior or justice. A grand jury declined to indict the police officers in the Eric Garner case. More broadly, it puts us in a strange, morally exigent position: we can’t say we didn’t see, we never knew; we have no plausible deniability. The videos keep coming out.