Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition http://www.akbars.net thoughts on life at Stanford and beyond Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:28:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Malcolm Gladwell talk Malcolm Gladwell spoke last night at this event (Daily coverage is here) about the role of serendipity in drug discovery, focusing on the story of Synta, a biotech company in Boston. Get the Flash Player to see this player or download the MP3 here. http://www.akbars.net/?p=97 Lick Observatory Lick Observatory, pictured above, is situated in the mountains east of San Jose, and when it was constructed in 1887 it was the world's largest refracting telescope (a title it held for about 10 years). Its benefactor, James Lick, made his fortune buying up real estate during the California Gold ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=96 new note-taking software When you take as many notes as I do over the course of the day, you end up spending a rather inordinate amount of time trying to organize them. Over the course of the years as my requirements have changed, I've switched from using WikidPad to OneNote to TiddlyWiki, but ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=95 Monopoly I was enthralled when I saw a research poster that a number of students had put together describing the optimal strategy for playing Monopoly. As it turns out, people have tried to figure this out before (here and here), but this one looked like a much clearer technique and presentation. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=93 JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla Motors talk JB Straubel, the CTO of Tesla Motors, gave a talk to a packed Stanford CarLab forum a few days ago. Some of the interesting tidbits from his presentation: the battery pack in a Tesla roadster costs around $25,000 battery technology is improving at 8% per year in terms of gravimetric or ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=90 Adeo Ressi talk Adeo Ressi, a seasoned entrepreneur and founder of theFunded.com, spoke recently to a group of students and CEOs on campus about startup fundraising in the current climate: Get the Flash Player to see this player or download the MP3 here. http://www.akbars.net/?p=89 bad statistics There was something bothering me a few weeks ago about an argument I remembered from James Surowiecki's book, the Wisdom of the Crowds, which is surprising as I had read it about two years ago. It regards the passage below, from page 8: "What this means is that the stock market ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=88 Burning a Hole in Fire a great analogy from the chairman of Oaktree Capital got me thinking about forest fires: "the Los Angeles Times kicked off a major series on forest fires. Here’s part of what it said: The government’s long campaign to tame wildfires has, perversely, made the problem worse. . . . By stamping out ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=87 Formula 1 pit-stop someone filmed a pit-stop with an infrared camera; from the 'streaks' the tires leave behind as the driver pulls away, I'm guessing they're either pre-heated, or weren't replaced (which would be unusual)... from the 2008 race in Turkey, courtesy F1.com they don't show races on the tele here (not that I have ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=85 the Man in the Middle not a variation of "the man in the arena," but a term from the world of cryptography. It's the technique British magician Derren Brown used while playing 9 others in games of chess, to come out on top. This is the video of the performance: Not that's impossible to do so ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=83 Steve Squyres talk Prof. Steve Squyres from Cornell delivered an awe-inspiring lecture a few months ago about his work on the NASA Mars rovers, and later signed his book for the audience. Get the Flash Player to see this player or download the MP3 here. It was cool how he made a point of answering questions ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=82 Learning from the Masters at the Louvre in Paris: http://www.akbars.net/?p=81 a Fool’s Errand, version 2 Prof. Martin Hellman gave a talk recently about the rationale behind his decision to work on "foolish" problems. The first of which resulted in the discovery of public-key cryptography with Diffie and Merkle, which is now used to secure all modern communications - from email (PGP) to credit card transactions ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=80 the End of the World is Nigh "Ringside seats for the 'bomb' were a hot ticket in 1951, when military and civilian VIPs watched from the officers club on Enewetak, just 12.5 miles from ground zero." - courtesy the June '85 volume of National Geographic. That's back when the Doomsday Clock was at 2 minutes to midnight. Which brings ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=79 3D and Math While watching this video (from here) on how to turn a sphere inside out without cutting it, I thought of taking the game at planarity.net that was mentioned by Mehran Sahami in a CS class and modifying it to make the edges bezier curves. Curves similar to the ones shown below, ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=78 Richard Stallman Talk Prof. Lessig from the law school hosted Richard Stallman, Harvard alum/MIT drop-out and founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of much of the GNU software (emacs, gcc) that helped build the Linux operating system to what it is today. He spoke about changes in the new 'copyleft' ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=72 An Unreasonable Man Ralph Nader stopped by a few months ago to give a talk in which he asked the audience, "How many of you know how to file a freedom of information act request?" I couldn't say that I did. Quite a few agencies have available the most requested information: CIA - Che ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=74 Slave Labor in the Belgian Congo The graphs show the correlation between number of bullets used (top) and the amount of rubber produced (bottom) at the Salanga post from 1904-1907. source: pg. 181 of Coquery-Vidrovitch's Le Congo au temps des Grands Compagnies Concessionaires, reffered to in Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost http://www.akbars.net/?p=73 Wind Energy I braved multiple barbed-wire fences to hike up close near the wind turbines scattered all over the Altamont Pass hills this morning in Livermore. They're surprisingly quiet, and have colored tips to prevent birds from flying in to them (litigation by environmental groups on this issue has been one of ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=75 Seen on Campus This piece of art, apparently the Stanford Wall by Joseph Albers, is hidden between Palm Drive and the GSB. From far away you're not quite sure what those lines are, and when you get closer the 3D illusion increases - the shadows cast by horizontal steel bars cause you ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=76 William Shockley This didn't make it to the online version of the Stanford Daily: "May 2, 1972: Shockley Denied Approval for Grad Genetics Course Professor William Shockley was refused university approval yesterday to teach a graduate special course on his research into 'dysgenics,' the study of worsening genetic qualities... [dean of the graduate school ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=77 Blind to Error It's World War II, and the military has a predicament: how to place armor on warplanes to minimize losses. All they have to work with are the bullet holes observed in planes returning from missions - and their recommendation is to put the armor where the planes have been ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=61 Graduation A girl outside the Stanford stadium was passing these out: an engineer would never have made such ambiguous arrows: http://www.akbars.net/?p=60 Mohsin Hamid Talk Mohsin Hamid dropped by Stanford a few weeks ago to give a talk about his new book, the Reluctant Fundamentalist. Get the Flash Player to see this player or download the MP3 here. Some tidbits: His mother was at a restaurant in Islamabad when she saw the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour sitting ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=62 Musings on the Israeli/Palestinian Campus Dialogue the following piece was submitted to The Stanford Daily for publication. Seeing as how the paper was only willing to print 3 of the 6 paragraphs, I decided not to go through with a watered-down version: In a rather tragic unfolding of Prof. Huntington's 'democracy paradox,' the Palestinians, sick of ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=63 All in the Name of Science Spent four hours at the Lucas Center at Stanford, part of the time inside a massive GE fMRI machine while wearing an electrode cap in order to conduct an EEG simultaneously. While scanning, it's as loud as a jackhammer going off at five paces, though I surprisingly didn't feel ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=64 Khosla & Somerville on Energy A few weeks ago Prof. Chris Somerville and Vinod Khosla gave separate talks at Stanford on future energy sources; I'll begin with Somerville's talk on ethanol production. He motivated the subject with Nate Lewis's estimate of how much land would be necessary to satisfy the country's energy needs with ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=65 Veterans of Future Wars Before Catch-22 and before M*A*S*H, there was the student group at Princeton formed to satirize the World War I veterans who had, during the depression, gotten the Treasury to grant them their pensions ten years earlier than planned. Lewis Gorin reasoned, well then, given the inevitability of wars, why ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=67 Hedging Political Contributions I was under the impression that individual donors are highly partisan, as this page on "soft money" shows, but corporations would want to hedge their bets to make sure they carry some weight in Washington regardless of which party comes to power. Indeed, a look at the top 100 ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=66 the Other Famous Stanford Psych Experiment Now that Zimbo (the license plate on his car) has bid us adieu, I thought I should mention the rather interesting study a vaguely remember having heard about once: Prof. David Rosenhan back in the late 60s conducted an experiment by getting eight normal people to check themselves into 12 ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=68 a History of Stanford Commencement Speakers, 1892- I hate it when information literally gets discarded or lost... I remember speaking to Prof. Hector Garcia- Molina a few years ago, when he mentioned his passion for photography and how even his digital photos that had been sitting on his hard disk had become corrupted. NASA I ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=71 Time Lapse I probably first really noticed time lapse movies on CNN (where they use them as transitions between shows) and wanted to find some more - the film Chronos looks spectacular. Marcello, a Stanford CS masters student, also demoed his site 2draw.net, which is a collaborative online drawing site where you can ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=70 A Fascinating Tidbit from History I remember being intrigued when my tenth-grade World History teacher, Phil Neeno, mentioned how the UN Security Council in 1950 had managed to pass a resolution that authorized the formation of a military coalition against the North Korean attack, considering that it would have faced a certain Soviet veto. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=69 Targeted Internet Advertising gone Horribly Wrong Let me venture a guess as to how this happened - the advertiser paid to be displayed on pages where "food" is mentioned in the article, which is a relevant and suitable match perhaps 90% of the time. not to mention the person who came up with the gem ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=54 Logic Grids & the Supreme Court I was thrilled to see this graphic in this month's issue of the Atlantic Monthly which shows how frequently the Supreme Court judges vote with each other each other on rulings. Harkens back to the halcyon days of elementary school math when we did logic grid puzzles in math. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=53 The Things we See but do not Notice The Stanford quad is surrounded by time capsules for every graduating year, and I like to frequent them to recreate the 'carpe diem' scene from the Dead Poet's Society. I must have passed by these two at least 50+ times, and while I noticed they were different from the ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=52 Manifold Destiny Great piece in the New Yorker about Grigori Perelman, the Russian mathematician who solved the long-standing Poincare conjecture and refused the Fields medal. The draft of the first part of his proof is here. An excerpt: When a member of a hiring committee at Stanford asked him for a ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=51 America’s Gift that Kept Giving I've heard several accounts of how the CIA made the unprecedented move of presenting the Shah of Iran with a few U.S. dollar printing plates so he could churn out as much counterfeit currency as he desired. Except that when he high-tailed it out of his country when the ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=55 Interview with Dr. Mike McKubre Dr. McKubre, head of new energy research at SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute - interesting, as part of the severence agreement that came out of Vietnam war protests, Stanford was entitled to 1% of SRIs profits in perpetuity - ie forever) was kind enough to give me some of ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=56 the Yosemite Puzzle and Bill Gates Driving down to Yosemite National Park for Thanksgiving, I reached the area depicted in the diagram and stopped at the red traffic light, noticing the sign that read "expect to wait 5 minutes" or something of that sort. Within a minute of the arrival of two police cars through ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=57 Edward Tufte Talk A few weeks ago Edward Tufte came by Stanford to give a talk, so naturally after reading all his books I jumped at the chance. I didn't realize he had actually done his bachelor's in statistics at Stanford back in the 60's. Among the highlights of the talk: Med ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=59 the Last Great Interview of the Century Brother Number One = Saloth Sar = Pol Pot. a while back I wrote a paper on the Cambodian genocide and got a chance to interview Noam Chomsky about why the western world didn't know about what was going on at the time. At the time I came ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=58 I love Graffiti I've tried to stay away from colorful language on this blog, but I just had to post this because it was so damn funny. Coming into the basement of Stanford's Computer Science department (a place so sadistic they are the only place I know of on campus that has ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=36 a History Lesson on Oliver Cromwell After i heard his name mentioned for the second time the other day, i decided to look him up. Apparently he's one of the few people despised enough by some of his successors to have warranted the dubious honor of a posthumous execution. That's right; not content with ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=38 an Inconvenient Truth Got a chance to read the book a few weeks ago and came across some amazing pictures and an explanation for a rather annoying problem on campus come springtime. The trees on campus tend to become infested with caterpillars hanging from the branches, getting in people's way - the ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=37 Slide Rules Still have their Uses I was at the North Face store when this caught my eye:. They had no idea what I was talking about when I asked them if they had any spare ones, but were nice enough to give me one off of another jacket... then of course there's the convenient ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=39 George Dantzig, in Memoriam George Dantzig, professor at Stanford, was best known for inventing linear programming, and for a particular incident that's worked its way into college lore: from an interview with the College Mathematics Journal: It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day at one of [Jerzy] Neyman's classes. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=42 Buckminster Fuller 'Everything I Know' is the title of a 42-hour lecture series given by Buckminster Fuller - text is available here. Bucky was kicked out of Harvard twice, and at age 27, bankrupt, jobless, having lost his daughter to polio, and on the verge of suicide, he deicded to embark ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=41 Carrier Pigeons Talking to my friend Trevor the other day about the Rothschild family when I mentioned how they controlled the news sources to the financial markets in the 1800s via carrier pigeons. Apparently it's not carrier pigeons but homing pigeons which can fly over 1500 miles; they can't be 'trained' ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=40 Saparmurat Niyazov This guy's wikipedia article reads like a tragic comedy. There's probably some merit to his claim that the country had no national identity after years of Soviet rule, but his solution seems to have been to shape the country in his own image. Among his more notable accomplishments ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=43 the Best Job Posting Ever We figured you might be tired of the same job postings day in and day out, so why don't you create your own with our essembly Recruiting Mad Lib (tm): essembly is a web ____ (floating point number) startup leveraging _______ (household cleanser) to create a dynamic, ad-supported _______ (piece of ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=44 End Crime by Giving Everyone a Gun A tranquilizer gun, that is. Whenever I hear of a gun crime I always think 'if they had only tranquilized the person instead' - they didn't really need to kill them. Hypothetically speaking, if you had some way of removing conventional firearms from the population and giving adults ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=45 Literature Probably my best English teacher ever was the elderly, soft-spoken Mr. Pellerin in the tenth grade. He would assign various poems and 20th century American books for us to read, and our assignments solely consisted of delivering a few minutes of our reflections to the class, after which he ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=46 It’s all about energy density where MJ = megajoules, L is liter, you get the following: Diesel: 47 MJ/kg or 34 MJ/L Gasoline: 44 MJ/kg or 29 MJ/L Ethanol: 23 MJ/kg or 20 MJ/L Methanol: 23 MJ/kg or 15 MJ/L Coal: 24 MJ/kg or 20 MJ/L Hydrogen Gas @ 691 atmospheres pressure: 120 MJ/kg or 4.7 MJ/L Compressed Natural Gas @ 197 ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=48 William Miller Talk William Miller was a former provost of Stanford, chairman of Borland software, former CEO of SRI International, and founder of Nanostellar (which he started at age 78!). He mentioned how he has been an investor in 22 startups, 12 of which were complete failures and 3 were 'home runs'. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=47 Werner Vogels Talk Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, delivered a talk to the 12 people who showed up for CS 309 class at Stanford a few days ago... he had previously been a researcher at Cornell for 12 years. Seemed a very down-to-earth guy and talked freely about something I had ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=49 the Gyrobot The Segway is neat but too expensive (even Trevor Blackwell's version)... but two wheels are redundant, no? Problem is unicycles are incredibly hard to balance - it apparently takes months to learn. Though you might be able to use the precession of gyroscopes to stabilize it when not ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=50 What color is a chameleon placed in front of a mirror? So I was reading Kevin Kelly's excellent book "Out of Control" this summer (apparently actors for the Matrix movie were required to read it before they looked at the movie's script) when he popped this brainteaser; if a chameleon changes its color to match its surroundings, what does it do ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=30 Pictogram Puzzles Otherwise known as rebus puzzles, they frequently appear on MENSA puzzles... I saw this one on a t-shirt in Cambridge - the symbols represent the letters M, I, and T, derived from evaluating each formula: . http://www.akbars.net/?p=29 Defeating Captchas So if you've been on the web recently, you've probably seen something like this prompting you to enter the text before the site grants you access: known as CAPTCHA's, they are a form of reverse Turing tests meant to identify an entity as a person or a 'dumb' machine based on ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=28 My Summer at the $100 Laptop Project I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to spend 3 months @ MIT working on the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC) this summer. I was joined by a cadre of four other students from all over, including: * Jacob Russ, Harvard, obsessive digital photographer * Samat Jain, Columbia, taught ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=27 Lucky Lindy I never realized how much an achievement Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic actually was until I saw this picture (courtesy Corbis): and the report of his arrival in Paris. As National Geographic put it, "he took off as an unknown boy from rural Minnesotta and landed 33 1/2 hours ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=35 Music Notation I'm taking introductory piano class with Prof. Zerlang this year... he mentioned something rather interesting in class. Traditional music scores are written left to right, mirroring the English language, with notes ranging from top to bottom of the ledger lines and spaces, like so: yet the piano itself has keys ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=34 Please Face the Rear This article originally appeared in a September issue of the Babson Free Press; many thanks to Justin Peagram for asking me to write it. The title of “fastest man on the earth” is not rightfully bestowed upon Superman or Chuck Yeager, but the erstwhile John ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=33 Putting to use all those Physics Classes Crossing past a frat @ MIT, Jacob and I noticed a massive man-made catapult/trebuchet in front of a frat house, apparently in anticipation for orientation. I wonder what they're planning to get airborne? It looked like the gray and orange objects at the bottom were huge blocks of ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=32 The End of my Experiments with Polyphasic Sleep So after a few weeks of trying to sleep in two spurts, three hours at night and an hour-and-a-half in the afternoon, I'm switching back to a normal sleep cycle. It's just been very hard to maintain, though the siestas were quite refreshing. I shot off an email ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=31 Request for Information I've been trying to get my hands on a video clip/picture from a somewhat famous documentary described here. It features a shot of a crop duster flying towards a caterpillar (not the machines, the insects) on a leaf, with both in perfect focus by way of a Frazier lens. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=18 The Search for Free Energy A fascinating book I came across in the engineering library. It seems to have been republished under the title "The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief, and their Lightbulb." Starts of with Tesla (undoubtedly the greatest inventor in modern history - practically created electricity & radio - no, it ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=24 The Language of College Mathematics and their true, more mundane meanings: * Order of Magnitude = so much larger/smaller than you can imagine * Q.E.D. = I'm done * Beyond the scope of this text.... = the modern version of Fermat's "not enough space to write in this margin." * non-trivial = the problem is a pain * well-posed problem ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=23 the 1906 Quake “In front of the Zoology building was a peculiar sight. A large statue of Agassiz pitched off a platform on the second story and plunged headfirst through the pavement. That was the one funny thing in the whole scene of wreck and ruin. They have been joking about poor ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=22 Am I Dyslexic? So the other day I was trying to figure out why some HTML code I was working on wasn't formatting correctly. I had spelled the code for the email link as "malito" instead of the apparently correct way which is "mailto." The only thing is, ever since I've ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=21 the Best Touchpad - Paper So I was looking around Stanford's Computer Science senior project faire (huge flat screen TVs everywhere) when I came across undoubtedly the coolest thing I had seen in quite some time, a wireless digital pen that would write on seemingly regular paper - with your strokes somehow showing up on ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=20 Heating/Cooling Chemically Ah, this harkens back to the days of A.P. Chemistry: it's possible to utilize chemical reactions to heat foods and chill beverages by utilizing their endothermic/exothermic nature. The U.S. military's meals ready to eat (MREs) make use of a "flameless ration heater (FRH), .. which is a water-activated exothermic ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=19 Risk Homeostasis: Screwy, Mindbending, and Counter-Intuitive First read about this theory in the book The Medici Effect. The premise is that you "compensate for higher risks in one area by taking lower risks in another" - best illustrated by a few examples: * driving into a dark, narrow tunnel, you slow down... as soon as you ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=26 virtually indestructable = non-biodegradable So i just got this fancy new thermos made out of "virtually indestructable polycarbonate".... and then I realized that probably means the world is stuck with it forever. apparently the only other man-made object visible from earth besides the great wall of China is the aptly-named Fresh-kills landfill on ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=25 the Importance of Healthcare Why spend your money on healthcare as opposed to education or poverty alleviation? From a purely statistical point of view, it seems that healthcare has a greater impact on quality of life than the other two, although they all seem to be related. From an article in the New Yorker ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=17 The Dangers of Popularity-Based Ranking Whether it's the top 10 results returned from a google search or the top 10 music downloads on iTunes, bestseller lists seem to have taken on a life of their own... to the extent that I'm guessing they're having a serious effect on individual behavior by way of the self-fulfilling ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=16 Elon Musk Talk Elon Musk dropped by campus for a talk on PayPal and SpaceX, two companies he's co/founded. Get the Flash Player to see this player or download the MP3 here. Highlights: Keeps a high signal (engineers) -to-noise (management) ratio Venture Capitalists travel in packs Dropped out of Stanford and lived in his office, showered at ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=15 It’s right there! It's Right There! So I went skiing with my brother in Squaw Valley a few weeks ago - it snowed the entire weekend. We went on the blue runs the entire day, and started out pretty shaky but got through by the end without crashing a single time (see image) ... we ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=14 James Dyson Talk This year's entrepreneurship conference at Stanford's GSB featured a talk by James Dyson of Dyson vacuum cleaner fame, though that would not be doing him honor for he's so much more than that - constant perserverence (5,000+ prototypes for the first working bagless vacuum cleaner) and some cool ideas like ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=13 Changing Traffic Lights on Whim So I heard this friend of mine say that if you flash your lights at a traffic signal it'll automatically go green. Needless to say that didn't work. But I did remember reading about something that actually does it - it's called an MIRT, and it's typically used by emergency ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=12 Why Voicemail Sucks & How to Fix It So you're probably sick of dialing your voicemail number, entering your pin, having to slug through the punch-key system to do stuff. Enter MMS. Get your voicemails delivered to you like SMS messages are and forget about pins, punching keys, just listen to voicemails like they were meant to be. Here's how ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=11 The Gideon’s Monopoly Why is it whenever you open that hotel drawer, you inevitably find a copy of the Bible placed there by the Gideons? What to these guys do, travel around with a suitcase full of bibles like door-to-door salesmen? And why do the hotels tolerate them - why not the Quran? ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=10 How Pakistan was saved? by the CIA So around December President Musharraf managed to survive his first of two assasination attempts when he crossed a bridge rigged to a bomb set to go off remotely by cell phone - as it happens the CIA planted a cell phone jammer on his cars in his motorcade so it ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=9 It’s come to this…. @ Denver airport: http://www.akbars.net/?p=8 Why Startups can Suck "So what are you working on? Well... I can't say too much about it." End of conversation. And universities are supposed to be a place for a free exchange of ideas? If everyone in L.A. has a screenplay and everyone in Compton has a mix tape, iIt seems only fitting that everyone ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=7 the 4 most secure networks in the world SWIFT for secure inter-bank money transfers the 13 root servers that handle domain name resolution on the Internet and propogate changes to the rest SS7 routers for routing billions of telephone calls a day ECHELON interceptions of sgatellite and wireless communications http://www.akbars.net/?p=6 Snake Robot Check out this video of a snake robot put together with Professor Andrew Ng and Nick Sivo last year... the pieces were acrylic, cut with a lasercam machine after design in a cad program. control was through a serial port on a laptop with microcontrollers driving servos on each section. ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=5 Eavesdropping on Phone Calls So it seems as if the easiest way to do this is not to get a GSM decryptor or patch a fiber optic cable, but to get a satellite feed from any one of the Intelsat telecommunicatiosn satellites which transmit transcontinental phone calls, among other things, completely unencrypted! I guess ... http://www.akbars.net/?p=4