"I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak."

The history books aren't going to look too good for Alan Greenspan. He will probably go down as the man most responsible for this global financial crisis. He'll get credit for both the housing bubble and the debt crisis for keeping interest rates low and successfully blocking regulation on derivatives.

At least he's honest though. Hopefully now that the strongest supporter of deregulation has realized it doesn't work, the whole objectivist / neoliberal / reganomic theory will be put to rest.

http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Google has resurrected its oldest index from 2001. Looks like it was pre-9/11 since there aren't many results for september 11th.

I've never been a fan of Boston's poor excuse for a public transportation system. I'm not sure what combinations of failures led to such a poor system for getting around in such a tiny city. It has been in the news lately because a few MIT students exposed holes in basically every security measure it uses (including getting unlimited free rides from the RFID cards). The MBTA responded by suing the students and trying to prevent them from revealing their findings. The court ultimately found that this last ditch security measure was not valid, and it failed like the rest of them. I've read through their presentation, and I'm thoroughly impressed. Plenty of social engineering along with brute-force tactics aimed at weaknesses. It's still pretty embarrassing how easy the MBTA made it for them though. Without further adieu, here's the presentation:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

A security researcher named Dan Kaminsky released a fundamental flaw in the design of the internet today that allows hackers to, among other things, send you their own web pages when you request a url such as "google.com". The flaw lies in the DNS system that translates domains to IP addresses (numbers that identify your computer on the internet). When you make a request for google.com or any other domain name, you ask your ISP what the IP address for that domain is, and then you connect to that IP address. Kaminsky published a way for an attacker to flood any ISP implementing the DNS protocol with requests in a way that sends other users to any IP address the attacker wishes.

Here is his webpage. He also has a tool that allows you to check whether your ISP has patched their system yet.

The manhattan solstice takes place yesterday and today. Every year at this time, the sun sets between every street in manhattan. Wikipedia has a more detailed article about it here. Here are some pictures taken from various streets walking up 6th avenue that I took yesterday around 8pm.

This is one of the most incredible stories I've read recently. Apparently tribes still exist in the rainforest of Peru and Brazil that (in the year 2008!) have never been contacted by the outside world. Here is a picture taken by a plane flying over the area, which they must have thought to be a bird or evil spirit.

From the article,

"It is extraordinary to think that, in 2008, there remain about a hundred groups of people, scattered over the Earth, who know nothing of our world and we nothing of theirs, save a handful of brief encounters."

This article is pretty interesting. It points to research done by Dr. Tadeusz Kawecki which indicates a negative correlation between intelligence and evolutionary fitness. They basically bred smarter flies by putting 15 successive generations through intelligence tests that determined their fate. It turns out these smarter flies die 20% faster than normal flies in typical fly conditions.

It's really no surprise then that not many animals are nearly as smart as humans. From the article, "Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning... Humans' oversize brains require 20 percent of all the calories burned at rest. A newborn's brain is so big that it can create serious risks for mother and child at birth. Yet newborns know so little that they are entirely helpless. It takes many years for humans to learn enough to live on their own." So what is the great benefit to being so smart?

I added a brief bio and some links to the site. You can find it here if you're interested. Just don't stalk me or anything.

Photo courtesy of Ellen Campbell (click to enlarge)

So this is where Bernanke has been getting his advice lately. Hopefully Ben won't end up like Brazino here, found by my friend Ellen on her lunch break in DC today.