Energy, Security

Oregonian transportation makes UK news

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The BBC reports that Oregon has been developing infrastructure systems while the rest of America (world?) falls behind. Couterbalancing the lure of cheap petroleum and giant personal automobiles with reasonable public transportation, the state now seems to have come out ahead of the rest of the nation:

Over the last 10 years, public transport use has gone up by 65% and they have managed to avoid a predicted 40% increase in congestion.

And, incredibly for a city in the world’s most car dependent nation, they’re eradicating over 62 million car trips a year, which means car use is growing at the slowest rate anywhere in the United States.

[…]

The benefits of a car-free diet for public health and the environment are huge. At a time when greenhouse gas emissions America wide have risen by 13%, in Portland they’re down to pre 1990 levels.

Sounds good. But is the 65% increase due to population growth, or people choosing public transportation over their cars, or both? Some other benefits are also brought to light:

But Portland isn’t just about successfully getting people out of their cars. What’s really clear, is the extent to which transport is the absolute bedrock of community development.

[…]

It’s great to see public and private sector working hand in hand delivering the best public transport for its community.

Sitting on the light rail on my way to the airport I notice a cycle lane running beside me – all the way to the terminal.

Cycling traffic has increased by 257% in the city over the last ten years and members of the cycling community I spoke to told me they feel they have a lot of support from local government in making the city even more bike friendly.

Building bike-routes in America that actually go somewhere? Now there’s a novel idea. I will never forget trying to ride a bike to work in Orange County, only to find that the paths would abruptly end on the side of a giant thoroughfare. Fences and barbed-wire were in place just to make sure you could tell that you were never meant to be able to get to the other side.

Poetry, Security

DeCSS in Haiku

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Not exactly what I would call haiku in spirit or form, but this work on Dave Touretzky’s site is at least mathematically correct as it follows the 575 pattern:

How to decrypt a
DVD: in haiku form.
(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)
————————

(I abandon my
exclusive rights to make or
perform copies of

this work, U. S. Code
Title Seventeen, section
One Hundred and Six.)

Muse! When we learned to
count, little did we know all
the things we could do

some day by shuffling
those numbers: Pythagoras
said “All is number”

long before he saw
computers and their effects,
or what they could do

by computation,
naive and mechanical
fast arithmetic.

It changed the world, it
changed our consciousness and lives
to have such fast math

available to
us and anyone who cared
to learn programming.

Now help me, Muse, for
I wish to tell a piece of
controversial math,

for which the lawyers
of DVD CCA
don’t forbear to sue:

that they alone should
know or have the right to teach
these skills and these rules.

(Do they understand
the content, or is it just
the effects they see?)

And all mathematics
is full of stories (just read
Eric Temple Bell);

and CSS is
no exception to this rule.
Sing, Muse, decryption

once secret, as all
knowledge, once unknown: how to
decrypt DVDs.

…

Poetry, Security

Snarkles Sneak

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Instead of translating your communication using something like babelfish, why not use sneak by snarkles and amuse your friends.

Here’s Matsuo Basho most famous poem in one-way DES:

CRAY67ihTYSbg

or perhaps you would prefer MD5:

bb5180417075141a9b354e24c066e3bf

and then there’s HEX:

41 6e 20 6f 6c 64 20 70 6f 6e 64 21 0d 0a 41 20 66 72 6f 67 20 6a 75 6d 70 73 20 69 6e 2d 0d 0a 54 68 65 20 73 6f 75 6e 64 20 6f 66 20 77 61 74 65 72 2e

Just worry about who snarkles really is and what s/he does with all the input…

Security

US Domestic violent crime wave

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A friend of mine used to have a joke (although it’s true) about the errors of correlative reasoning:

Did you know that as ice-cream consumption goes up there will be more crime? More ice-cream is consumed in the summer, more crime is committed in the summer (when it is warm). Therefore the cause of both ice-cream consumption and crime is actually the rise in temperature.

I suppose he also could have said as crime goes up people start eating more ice-cream. Anyway, here is a bit of disturbing news about crime statistics in America:

In a shift from trends of the past decade, violent crime is on the rise, fueling criticism of Bush administration policies as a wave of murders and shootings hits smaller cities and states with little experience with serious urban violence.

From Kansas City, Missouri, to Indianapolis, Indiana, places that rarely attract notice on annual
FBI crime surveys are seeing significant increases in murder. Boston, once a model city in America’s battle against gun violence, is poised to eclipse last year’s homicide tally, which was the worst in a decade.

Explanations vary — from softer gun laws to budget cuts, fewer police on the beat, more people in poverty and simple complacency. But many blame a national preoccupation with potential threats from abroad.

Or maybe it’s just changes to the environment and things are warmer than usual…which also just happens to be something you can blame the Bush administration for handling poorly. Another perspective is provided by places that show a decline:

In Miami, while overall crime is down, the use of semi-automatic weapons is growing.

“These things are dirt cheap,” Police Chief John Timoney told Reuters, estimating the street price at $250 each. “We have seen these assault weapons being used time and time again by drug gangs.”

Is there less crime due to the increase of assault weapons, or an increase of assault weapons due to the efforts to reduce crime? Either way, domestic violence seems is becoming a hot topic of concern.