Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

The O’Reilly Factor comments on Jack Welch’s comment:

It’s in the second part of the segment. It quotes: “There is no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices.”

He’s absolutely right. “Work-life balance” is as silly as “study-party balance”. You either study or you party. You either work and be productive or lazily “enjoy life”. There is no balance between being pregnant and not being pregnant. There is no balance between being dedicated to work and not being dedicated to work.

I frankly don’t see what’s so hard to understand, but then, I’m probably underestimating the liberal sophistry.

In another demonstration of, well, how exercise of copyright control really looks like censorship.

Will they reimburse customers who bought the ebook version, or will they simply say that they have never been charged. You know, the way we’ve been always at war with Eastasia and stimulus is stabilization.

Anyways. I guess I am not buying Kindle until they work out these legal issues. For now, I’ll just … enjoy the irony of Kindle ad on the Slashdot story.

Well, I picked up an iMac G5 from the electronics discard area by 151 Le Conte. I am hoping that it’s a perfectly good machine (I see no visible damage and unit powers on) thrown away by someone who upgraded his computer.

I opened it up following the directions here (apparently they’ve made these iMacs really easy to open). But unfortunately, it’s apparently missing it’s SATA drive, and more importantly, RAM, which means I can’t quite test to see if it does actually work.

I don’t think I have any spare DDR rams, especially ones meeting the criteria for use with iMac G5. So, I am going to have to ask around tomorrow for one, and if not, I may have to take a chance (that this machine is working) and order one online.

It would be very nice if this works (it’s a nice, self-contained unit no larger than an LCD) … but we shall see.

Edit: It seems to start up O.K. with a DDR ram we had hanging around in the lab. I wouldn’t trust it … until an OS could be installed on a hard drive and successfully booted from that drive, but so far so good.

Or next generation of re-wording what others have been doing for almost a decade?

By using a laser beam to impose the quantum state of a molecular transistor, the research team demonstrated control of a second laser beam, which reflects the way in which a conventional transistor works.

“The next step is to ‘connect’ two or more [single-molecule optical transistors],” Pototschnig told us with regard to future areas the team will be focusing on. “In other words, we have to connect two molecules in a way that the quantum mechanical superposition state of each molecule is exchanged in a coherent manner. Only that way the strength of the quantum computing principles can be fully taken advantage of. We are in the middle of coming up with actual ways to implement the connection idea.”

I fail to see how this is different from normal and usual techniques (such as CPT and EIT, which involves two lasers (or more) acting coherently on three (or more) atomic levels) people have been using in AMO physics for a very long time. And I think at least for two decades or so (i.e. since the advent of laser cooling), people have been doing this stuff with single atoms (and maybe single molecules) in a cavity.

I mean, it’s one thing for some people to call these devices “optical switch”, in order to bring attention to the fact that, well, these effects can be used as optical switch (networks and communications people wouldn’t be as enthralled with words like “electromagnetically induced transparency” or “coherent population trapping”). But to claim that something that is little more than an optical switch is actually a “optical transistor”? That seems, well, irresponsible.

It’s a shame that this article didn’t actually link to the journal article supposedly published in Nature. Then I could see for myself whether this is yet another typical bad science journalism (for every good article I see in science and tech, I see at least 2 or 3 spectacularly bad ones), or if the author himself is, well, so isolated from the scientific community that he doesn’t know that he is simply reproducing what others have been doing for a long time—except, I guess, that he’s using a slightly more complicated molecule, maybe.

Edit: This article links to the journal in the references (found via Slashdot comments). You’ll need some kind of library subscription to see full article, but even the abstract shows that the authors of this article did consider other work in AMO physics using cooled/trapped atoms in cavities, and their work, presumably, represents a marginal advancement in these techniques. So, this is yet another case of bad, sensationalist journalism, where the so-called “journalist” tries to justify his salary by trying to paint a small-step improvement as some kind of other-worldly breakthrough (… that he happens to be covering).

An old geezer writes:

I recommend that my students—and the rest of us!—stop looking for answers on the internet and instead go out and play in the real world. We can learn a lot more physics from Nature than from being stuck to the computer screen. Why not emulate Copernicus, Galileo, or Isaac Newton, who saw the world with their own eyes. Spend time walking in the woods, listening to the ocean, experiencing the beauty of the spring flowers, and being amazed by the vast expanse of the night sky; it’s bigger than your computer screen, you know. Nature—not the internet—is still the greatest teacher.

Well, guess what Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton all had in common?

They were all wrong.

Copernicus was wrong to say that the planets orbited the sun in circular orbits (‘sorry; it’s elliptical). Galileo is famously wrong with his insistence on Galilean relativity (we now know that it’s the special relativity that holds true in the absence of gravity). And Newton was not only wrong with corpuscular theory of light (well, in the light of existence of photons, you could argue that he wasn’t entirely wrong, but if you insist on bringing quantum mechanics into this, then Newton was utterly, irreconcilably wrong in his entire work, save perhaps for calculus, for which another man deserves more credit), but he couldn’t provide any credible explanation for the one thing that he’s known for: Newtonian gravity (another theory which is quite wrong on the details, by the way).

I would be hard pressed to argue that these men were wrong simply because they didn’t have access to computers. Or Internet, although a simple Google search today will show that these men are wrong. But then, I can ask in turn: who put the man on the moon? Was it Kennedy? Was it the engineers down in Houston? Was it the astronauts? I dare say it was the computing machines (and maybe the men who made them … for creating something greater than themselves) that deserve more credit. Computers themselves can get to the moon now on their own (look at all the unmanned probes we are sending to Mars). Can we say the same for any man, except for fictional beings like the Superman?

Computers are the future. To deny the computer is to deny the future of sentience.

On Slashdot:

“Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university’s Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. ‘The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,’ says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. ‘We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.’ During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. ‘This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,’ said Roth. ‘And it has probably not helped this country, either.’”

If the facts as represented are accurate, it seems clear enough: the professor is guilty, if not of actual treason against this country, then of extremely poor judgment. Even naturalized U.S. citizens (to my great dismay) have betrayed this country before either for the sake of money or for the sake of their “motherland” (as if after they took the naturalization oath, they belonged to any country other than United States of America). Foreign graduate students are not U.S. citizens. They are not even permanent residents. Their stay in the U.S. is contingent not only on the visas we issue them, but on the validity of their passport. They can not only be persuaded by their home government but even pressed into service against their will, given how much control over their life the foreign government has. As brilliant as these people are, they cannot work on sensitive projects, and they cannot be allowed access to sensitive data, even inadvertently.

No one said that we cannot hire foreign graduate students—that would be great tragedy indeed, as they are some of the brightest people in American graduate schools (at least judging by test scores and classroom grades). We just cannot hire them for sensitive projects (at least before they decide to stay in this country and become naturalized). This professor was an idiot for not properly shielding his graduate students from sensitive information that would be too tempting for them—or even if not, the access itself, whether they actually used it or not, could be brought against them to arouse sufficient suspicion.

… as a graduate student who lives on tax dollars, either at federal or state level:

On HotAir.com:

Felix Salmon at Reuters also discovers that not all creditors are created equal in California’s eyes. Some people will still get cash rather than a wish sandwich in the mail. See if you can discern a theme:

People who get California IOUs	People California pays in cash
Grants to aged, blind or disabled persons	University of California
People needing temporary assistance for basic family needs	Public Employees’ Retirement System
People in drug prevention, treatment, and recovery services	Legislators, legislative employees, and appointees
Persons with developmental disablities	Judges
People in mental health treatment	Department of Corrections
Small Business Vendors	Health Care Services payments to Institutional Providers

Well, the only reason University of California is in the list of state institutions still paying out cash is, well, UC is now only partly a state institution. Already the flagship campus UC Berkeley relies more heavily on private donations than ever (I think somewhere around 15% of the operating budget now). When the issue of state budge came up some months ago (because, well, HotAir.com’s right—this “crisis” could’ve been avoided if the unprincipled legislators could make the necessary cuts and “sacrifices” months ago), the statement from university official was, well, UC has enough discretionary funding that does not depend on the state funding in the short term that lack of payments from the state on a month-to-month basis will not affect UC employees.

It’s not that California state government is somehow giving special treatment to UC employees—it’s that UC system itself has enough funding independent of this mess of a government that it can shield its employees from the stupid government.

And this is probably the strongest argument one can provide in support of further “privatization” of UC system. There is a reason the nation’s best universities are private schools. In order for the best schools in the UC system (i.e. UC Berkeley and UC LA) to compete with them, we need to compete for and win private funding, because well, frankly state funding is too unreliable and too immoral.

Cory Doctorow writes for Guardian,

More specifically, what about the secrets that protect our data? Like an increasing number of people who care about the security and integrity of their data, I have encrypted all my hard-drives – the ones in my laptops and the backup drives, using 128-bit AES – the Advanced Encryption Standard. Without the passphrase that unlocks my key, the data on those drives is unrecoverable, barring major, seismic advances in quantum computing, or a fundamental revolution in computing.

After considering a few options that most people who think about this particular problem would, including an option I might have considered adequate, a safebox containing the passphrase (or an unencrypted private key which can be used to similar effect), and rejecting them, he concludes,

Finally, I hit on a simple solution: I’d split the passphrase in two, and give half of it to my wife, and the other half to my parents’ lawyer in Toronto. The lawyer is out of reach of a British court order, and my wife’s half of the passphrase is useless without the lawyer’s half (and she’s out of reach of a Canadian court order).

Obviously this makes the attack on the passphrase slightly easier: if it was originally 10-characters long, then now the attacker needs to consider only 5-character passphrase, once he gets the control of one. But it’s probably easy enough to make your passphrase long enough to minimize this problem, i.e. make your passphrases 40-chars long instead of the recommended 20-chars (for my full hard drive encryption, I use a 26-char password and it’s probably not too difficult for me to memorize one that’s twice as long).

And if you don’t mind a little bit of technical complexity, you can split the key mathematically rather than as a string: i.e. for each character, take its ASCII code, and split it, randomly, into two numbers (running both positively and negatively, say from -255 to 255; it wouldn’t be possible to split them into another sets of printable ASCII codes, as lowest 32 numbers aren’t printable, so may as well just turn each character into numbers) so that when they are added together, you get the correct character back, and store information about these two sets of numbers separately—and either of these two sets by itself is literally nothing but a random set of numbers, betraying no information about the actual passphrase.

Overall, I think this is a good scheme, except, well, it only works for people with connections in two countries (and if the liberals have their way, we will have the One World Government pretty soon, so splitting jurisdiction may not be an option soon).

It seems like, at least in any scenarios I can think of, if you want to share a secret with someone else and wants to keep it secret (between the two of you), then the only way to do it is under some subterfuge—either regarding the fact that you have a secret, or that the other person shares it (so that you can prevent the person from getting subpoenaed).