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February 28, 2006

"Build a miniature city, put it outside the window, tell them it's far away. It'll look real if you squint."

I thought it would be a fun project to write and record a pop tune using nothing but cellos, then make a video of the performance. The original goal was to keep everything entirely acoustic, with no recording studio effects or other processing. I quickly abandoned that idea to get more variety of sounds, but everything you hear was played entirely on my cello. There are 37 separate cello parts recorded on 23 tracks using 37 plug-in effects.

I don't know if I should be embarrassed to admit I spent hundreds of hours on this project, or proud to have paid so much attention to detail. You be the judge. So pick a media version your computer supports, crank the volume up to 11, and let 'er rip.
With a very little effort, you can take existing photographs of everyday scenes and make it look like they're actually of miniature models.

It doesn't take much to fool the mind of the viewer, but there are a few basic rules you can follow to help convince your audience that they're looking at a railway set rather then the real world; see the section on picking the right photo at the bottom of this page. You'll need a copy of Photoshop CS or later to follow this tutorial.
Exactly as Strauss prescribed, Rob approached a set of two hard-looking blondes, ignored his prettier "target," then addressed her friend with a canned line he learned early in the book:

"Hey, I need your opinion on something. My friend over there, he wants to buy a wallaby."

The two women were confused but intrigued, and that was enough of an in. They asked what and why and how, and the absurdity of the question overshadowed the discomfort of someone randomly coming up and asking it. The target, presumably used to men approaching her first and certainly not used to men who pretend she's not even there, finally gave Rob some shit, revealing her thick Boston accent: "What are you, friends with weirdos or something?" A perfect setup for Rob's neg. Without looking at the girl, he said to her friend, "Is she always this irritable?"

While Popcorn Dog flew in to occupy the target's friend, Rob now focused on the target, armed with a dizzying mix of straight fluff, playground teases, jokes about people in the bar, and then, finally, a question: "Do you wanna kiss me?"

As mentioned, pickup artists have thought through every social situation, planned for every contingency. If she says "yes" to Rob's question, for instance, he kisses her. If she says "maybe," he also kisses her. If she says "no," Rob responds, "I didn't say you could-—you just looked like you had something on your mind."
The new "features" this time are primarily performance improvements possible due to the use of better algorithms (bringing more inherent parallelism of trying multiple candidate passwords down to processor instruction level), better optimized code, and new hardware capabilities (such as AltiVec available on PowerPC G4 and G5 processors).

In particular, John the Ripper 1.7 is a lot faster at Windows LM hashes than version 1.6 used to be. (Since JtR is primarily a Unix password cracker, optimizing the Windows LM hash support was not a priority and hence it was not done in time for the 1.6 release.) John's "raw" performance at LM hashes is now similar to or slightly better than that of commercial Windows password crackers such as LC5 - and that's despite John trying candidate passwords in a more sophisticated order based on statistical information (resulting in typical passwords getting cracked earlier).

John the Ripper 1.7 also improves on the use of MMX on x86 and starts to use AltiVec on PowerPC processors when cracking DES-based hashes (that is, both Unix crypt(3) and Windows LM hashes). To my knowledge, John 1.7 (or rather, one of the development snapshots leading to this release) is the first program to cross the 1 million Unix crypts per second (c/s) boundary on a general-purpose CPU. Currently, John 1.7 achieves up to 1.6M c/s raw performance (that is, with no matching salts) on a PowerPC G5 at 2.7 GHz (or 1.1M c/s on a 1.8 GHz) and touches 1M c/s on the fastest AMD CPUs currently available.
Hundreds of security-vetted BBC staff and a select band of unnamed radio artistes were to be clandestinely dispatched to transmission sites across the country at the first signs of international tension.

Just before the first missiles had reached Britain, the BBC was to use regional centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol and Middlesbrough to broadcast a national service that the Government hoped would create "a diversion to relieve strain and stress".

By 1960 the BBC had stockpiled thousands of recordings of "war" programmes and records for possible broadcast at the height of an attack.
"It is not a coincidence that the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s were marked by years of tremendous hurricane activity," said AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center Chief Forecaster Joe Bastardi. "For example, the record-shattering 2005 hurricane season was the first to eclipse 1933 in number of tropical cyclones, and that may only have been because we didn't have satellites in the 1930s to identify the major storms that failed to reach the U.S. coast."

Hurricanes are fed by warm waters. This year's warm Atlantic waters-which are now setting up a possible major drought in the U.S.-played a major role in the 2005 season's numerous and powerful storms. Conversely, because the Pacific has been relatively cool-another prerequisite for the return of a Dust Bowl-like drought-this year's Pacific hurricane season was tame from historical perspective.

Added Bastardi, "While we cannot yet tell how long this current pattern will last, if you trust history, then the 2005 hurricane season just may portend the return of a major drought to the Great Plains."
In this test, the important thing was to find out whether brain activity before an event has an impact on memory or whether, as was previously thought, it's just brain activity after an event that is important for memory. Without the timeline given by an EEG scanner such an analysis would not be possible.

Tests showed that the brain's electrical activity differed after the cue question and before the word was presented and this was linked to whether the subject would remember or forget the word in a later unexpected memory test. If the electrical activity maintained a high level over frontal parts of the scalp just before the word was shown, then it was likely that the subject would remember the word up to 50 minutes later - and after doing a series of other word tests. On the other hand, if the voltage was lower, the subjects were less likely to remember the word.

Posted by Jon Rubin at February 28, 2006 04:44 PM

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Comments

...until tobias and jet-packed george michael do battle and destroy it. glad to know you're an AD fan too.

[But of course. Glad to know you stayed current with the series overseas. Damn cancellation-happy FOX.
—Jon]

Posted by: colin at March 1, 2006 06:20 AM

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