Category: information theory

  • As random as I oughta be

    From John D. Cook‘s Probability Facts twitter feed, discovered the infamous RANDU, and this absolutely marvelous quote: One of us recalls producing a “random” plot with only 11 planes, and being told by his computer center’s programming consultant that he had misused the random number generator: “We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we…

  • Looking for work, 2012 edition

    A short note (implied by my updates on Twitter), just to say: I was laid off last week from my previous employment in an abrupt downsizing — a company pivot, evidently away from the work I like to do.  I’m looking for work now.  Below the jump: what I’m looking for.

  • Norvig says it better

    Those who got fired up about Chomsky’s difficult comments regarding empiricism, including myself, will be gratified to see that Peter Norvig, patron saint of data-driven computational linguistics (inter alia), has released his own comments, along the same lines as mine, only better researched, more broadly researched, more respectful, more thorough, and, well, coming from the keyboard…

  • private key punchlines

    Has anybody written about humor as a sign of a successful encryption strategy? I think that a good joke might be a lot like a sweet encryption, and I’d like to explore this notion: The sweet spot of jokes is actually the same as the sweet spot of sweet cryptography schemes. Consider two failed joke…

  • broadsheets from the empirical underground

    I’ve been corresponding with Zoltán Varjú, an enthusiastic proponent of what he describes as “rationalist” linguistics, and Melody Dye, who I would describe as a strongly “empirical” linguist — or rather, psychologist of language.  Also chiming in on that conversation has been Asad Sayeed, an old colleague of mine at the 2005 2003 JHU CLSP…

  • sentence fragments will not save us

    Thomas Baekdal’s post on using passphrases (from 2007) came up again two weeks back. In that post, Baekdal maintained the following thesis (I paraphrase): Passphrases are better than passwords, because they are easier to remember and (because they are longer) they are “mathematically” harder to crack. A series of security articles last week pointed to…