{"id":11838,"date":"2024-10-01T17:35:21","date_gmt":"2024-10-01T07:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=11838"},"modified":"2024-10-01T17:35:22","modified_gmt":"2024-10-01T07:35:22","slug":"assorted-musings-episode-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2024\/10\/01\/assorted-musings-episode-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Assorted musings (Episode 1?)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Not enough to warrant a full blog article, but here are a few things that have caught my attention of late:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The Register <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2024\/09\/21\/human_genome_5d_memory_crystal\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2024\/09\/21\/human_genome_5d_memory_crystal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><strong>reports that researchers have used a laser<\/strong><\/a> to inscribe the human genome in a 5D memory crystal \u2013\u00a0something that&#8217;s apparently designed to last billions of years. As a backup person, this sort of longevity of storage appeals to me. (And as someone sitting on a planet plagued with demagogues who&#8217;d make Alcibiades cringe in horror, watching climate change march to its inevitable conclusion I say: make thousands of copies of these and blast them into space. We&#8217;re gonna need that backup.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>While by no means the universal authority on all things IT, NIST has recently published guidelines <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2024\/09\/nist-proposes-barring-some-of-the-most-nonsensical-password-rules\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2024\/09\/nist-proposes-barring-some-of-the-most-nonsensical-password-rules\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">that throw out a lot of inane password rules<\/a><\/strong> that make things unnecessarily complex for people. I&#8217;m keen on this: forcing people to change their passwords frequently results in most people choosing the shortest possible password, and using minimalist rotation methods. I for one look forward to hearing about passwords like &#8220;Frozen weasels taste kind of funny if you don&#8217;t thaw them first&#8221;.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>NSW police have <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.itnews.com.au\/news\/nsw-police-block-encrypted-apps-on-issued-devices-612031\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.itnews.com.au\/news\/nsw-police-block-encrypted-apps-on-issued-devices-612031\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">blocked a number of social media and encrypted communications apps<\/a><\/strong> on their corporate issued devices. With all stories we see in the media about undesirable group chats amongst law enforcement folk, I have to say I support this sort of directive. (Far better than other directives we&#8217;ve seen in Australia in law enforcement, like discriminatory beard policies, which <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.3aw.com.au\/ban-lifted-the-noticeable-change-coming-to-victoria-police\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.3aw.com.au\/ban-lifted-the-noticeable-change-coming-to-victoria-police\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">thankfully were eventually dropped<\/a><\/strong>.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The very public disagreement between <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2024\/10\/01\/att_broadcom_filings_update\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2024\/10\/01\/att_broadcom_filings_update\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">AT&amp;T and Broadcom<\/a><\/strong> continues and I can&#8217;t help but think of what happened to Solaris after Oracle purchased Sun.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Apparently physicists have discovered <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/evidence-of-negative-time-found-in-quantum-physics-experiment\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/evidence-of-negative-time-found-in-quantum-physics-experiment\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Negative Time<\/a><\/strong>. (To be honest I&#8217;m kind of surprised it&#8217;s taken them this long to discover negative time. I distinctly recall discovering it in September 2000 when I was 11 hours into a 12 hour change window in a datacentre only to be told that the paperwork wasn&#8217;t correct and we had four hours to roll everything back.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>And finally, having (relatively) recently discovered I have aphantasia, I&#8217;ve been reading up on it quite a bit. It&#8217;s been interesting to map some of my behaviours to aphantasia now I understand it better \u2013\u00a0and this article about people with <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/seekreality.com\/people-who-cant-see-images-in-the-mind-have-less-grief\/\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/seekreality.com\/people-who-cant-see-images-in-the-mind-have-less-grief\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">aphantasia experiencing less grief was an absolute relief<\/a><\/strong> to me. It turns out I wasn&#8217;t the only person with aphantasia who secretly worried that they may have been a bit of a sociopath based on alternate emotional experiences. Nope, it turns out it&#8217;s all about mental imagery (or a lack thereof).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Not enough to warrant a full blog article, but here are a few things that have caught my attention of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[1703,138,1706,1707,1087],"class_list":["post-11838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aside","tag-aphantasia","tag-backup","tag-random-links","tag-time","tag-vmware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/bigStock-Dreamland.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-34W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11838"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11840,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11838\/revisions\/11840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}