04w36:1 Alice and Bob Posted August 31st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 36 number 1 (Alice and Bob) ——————————————————————— Teleportation goes long distance | Paul Rincon http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3576594.stm “Researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science used an 800m-long optical fibre fed through a public sewer system tunnel to connect labs on opposite sides of the River Danube. The link establishes a channel between the labs, dubbed Alice and Bob. This enables the properties, or ‘quantum states’, of light particles to be transferred between the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob). In the computers of tomorrow, this information would form the qubits (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines. “ The Story of Alice and Bob | John Gordon http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/rafaeli/funnies/alicebob.html “Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn’t trust, whom she can’t hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax return and to organise a cout d’etat, while at the same time minimising the cost of the phone call. A coding theorist is someone who doesn’t think Alice is crazy.” Alice and Bob | wordiq.com http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Alice_and_Bob “Alice and Bob are common archetypal ‘characters’ used in explanations in fields such as cryptography and physics. The names are used for convenience, since explanations such as ‘Person A wants to send a message to person B’ rapidly become difficult to follow. The names are also said to be politically correct, since they are from both sexes, and were chosen only because of the alphabetical order.” Chapter 1, Bits | MIT Open Course Ware: Information and Entropy, Spring 2003 http://tinyurl.com/3nq3d “How is information quantiï¬ed? Consider a situation that could have any of several possible outcomes. An example might be flipping a coin (2 outcomes, heads or tails) or selecting a card from a deck of playing cards (52 possible outcomes). How compactly could one person (by convention usually named Alice) tell another person (Bob) this outcome?” NOTE: links to a PDF file, 144K —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 31 August 2004 @ 10:40 PM
04w35:2 Craigslist Posted August 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 35 number 2 (craigslist) ——————————————————————— Mr. Craigslist, Master of the Nerdiverse | Josh McHugh http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/craigslist.html “It started as a free email list that tracked art events, job listings, and apartment rentals in San Francisco. Nine years later, craigslist serves 45 cities and has 5 million visitors a month. Now a Web site, it’s still mostly free, which may account for the loyalty of craigslisters, who turn to it for everything from finding dates to selling cars and, oh, ‘lickable boots.’ “ I grabbed your boobs on Sunset. – m4w – 24 | Anonymous http://losangeles.craigslist.org/mis/39483432.html “Saturday night, I was out with my buddies walking around on Sunset, going from bar to bar, club to club, etc. You were, presumably, with your girl friends. As we neared each other, none of us made eye contact. It’s as though we were trying not to look at each other. I sure as hell was. But because of this, I wasn’t looking where I was going either, and tripped on a crack in the pavement and tripped, falling forward, right as you were passing by. My arms flailed about and tried to grab the nearest sturdy thing to steady myself…” Thanks to Ed Deary for the craigslist submission. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Friday 27 August 2004 @ 12:06 PM
04w35:1 Posted August 26th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 35 number 1 ——————————————————————— Only the jester speaks the truth | Vinay Menon http://tinyurl.com/6x9ct “Jon Stewart claims he’s a fake newsman. But these days, his impact on politics and media is undeniably real. […] During a May appearance on Fox News Channel, the bombastic Sean Hannity asked Stewart, ‘Are you liberal or conservative or do you even care?’ Stewart: ‘I don’t care. I mean, I’m not even sure if those paradigms hold true any more.’ Or, as Stewart told Entertainment Weekly last year, ‘The point of view of this show is we’re passionately opposed to bullshit.’ In this age of spin and stupidity, where politicians and their pliable cheerleaders are the merchants of bullshit, his attitude explains why The Daily Show has become must-see TV.” Fuck New York | in8.com http://in8.com/fucknewyork/Resources/fucknewyork.mov Translating it for the kids – Quicktime MOV 9.12MB —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 26 August 2004 @ 9:59 PM
04w34:1 All Your Base Are Belong to U.S. Posted August 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 34 number 1 (all your base are belong to U.S.) ——————————————————————— Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive | Alan Cullison http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200409/cullison “Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.” War of the worlds | Giles Foden http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,779530,00.html “In October last year [2001], an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov’s 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title ‘al-Qaida’. […] The Arabic word qaida – ordinarily meaning ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ – is also used for ‘groundwork’ and ‘basis’.” Article date: 24 August 2002 All you base are belong to us | various – compilation http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/flash/ Flash presentation. Check out history of the phrase under the site’s ‘History’ section. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Sunday 15 August 2004 @ 1:38 PM
04w32:1 Posted August 5th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 32 number 1 Readers of Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes will recognize today’s must-read code-red as an article he has been promoting over the past few days. It is from the LA Times and will require a login if you haven’t visited before. The other two articles are from the New York Times, which I’ve urged people in the past to read asap because otherwise the articles get archived and are then only accessible for a fee. That is no longer necessary, as the NYT has modified urls available via their RSS feeds especially for bloggers to link to, which allow them to be active indefinitely. (Thanks to Chris Hand at Zeke’s Gallery for clueing me into this a couple of months back). – Timothy ——————————————————————— Art of the Impolitic in Syria | Megan K. Stack http://tinyurl.com/5sngx “‘I hate people when they’re like rabbits. Scared people, I can’t even look at them,’ he said. ‘I know my work can help my country so much. If you haven’t visited Syria, you don’t know what is Syria. And I know the culture is stronger than any gun.’ […]’The old prime minister [Mohammed Mustafa Miro] was joking with me one day. He said, ‘Yes, we know you have a lot of problems, but when you die we will build you a sculpture.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you help me now and forget about the sculpture?’ ‘ Touma isn’t afraid to fight dirty. He collected the private fax and mobile phone numbers of government officials, and dug up dirt �’ extramarital affairs and the like �’ on some of his adversaries in the party to keep them at bay. ‘Anybody you hate in the government, you can find somebody else who hates him,’ he said. ‘In any government in the world, there is somebody there who will help you, not because he likes you, but because he hates the other guy.'” NOTE: If prompted, use login: goodreads and password:goodreads As Repression Lifts, More Iranians Change Their Sex | Nazila Fathi http://tinyurl.com/4uney “After decades of repression, the Islamic government is recognizing that some people want to change their sex, and allowing them to have operations and obtain new birth certificates. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there was no particular policy regarding transsexuals. Iranians with the inclination, means and connections could obtain the necessary medical treatment and new identity documents. The new religious government, however, classed transsexuals and transvestites with gays and lesbians, who were condemned by Islam and faced the punishment of lashing under Iran’s penal code. But these days, Iran’s Muslim clerics, who dominate the judiciary, are considerably better informed about transsexuality. Some clerics now even recommend sex-change operations to those who are troubled about their gender. The issue was discussed at a conference in Tehran in June that drew officials from other Persian Gulf countries. […] One early campaigner for transsexual rights is Maryam Hatoon Molkara, who was formerly a man known as Fereydoon. Before the revolution, under the shah, he had longed to become a woman but could not afford surgery. Furthermore, he wanted religious guidance. In 1978, he wrote to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was to become the leader of the revolution but was still in exile, explaining his situation. The ayatollah replied that his case was different from that of a homosexual and therefore he had his blessing.” Criticism Starts at Home | Henry Louis Gates Jr. http://tinyurl.com/3z6ol “It also starts with broken dreams. Near the end of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ a young woman challenges her African boyfriend’s fond hopes for decolonization: ‘You think you can patch up the world. Cure the Great Sore of Colonialism with the ‘penicillin of Independence.’ ‘ But what comes after? ‘What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come to power to steal and plunder the same as before, only now they will be black and do it in the name of the new independence?’ A year later, Nigeria and 15 other countries declared their independence. Yet today, according to the nonprofit organization Freedom House, only about a fifth of sub-Saharan Africa would qualify as ‘ free.’ Nor is democracy alone any guarantee of sound governance; Mr. Soyinka told me he likens South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who spent years denying the realities of H.I.V./AIDS (even as the epidemic’s toll exceeded the number of people shipped from Africa in the trans-Atlantic slave trade), to imams who fought a WHO campaign to eradicate polio: ‘I find his position virtually as illiterate as the position of Muslim fundamentalists here in Nigeria who say that they read somewhere in the Koran that polio immunization is anti-Islamic.’ “ Note: for New York Times articles, if prompted, use login:goodreads100 and password:goodreads —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 05 August 2004 @ 3:29 PM
