danhou.com

Every year the infamous hacker JonnyX issues a challege to the hacking community in the form of an encrypted message known as the PhreakNic. In 2000, the version 3.0 of the PhreakNic code had remained uncracked for over a year, despite the best efforts of some of the top crytographic minds in the States.

At which point Elonka Dunin, a games developer with no prior ciphering experience, managed to crack the code in 10 days. Fortunately for us, she put together a step-by-step tutorial on how she did it.

For those with an inner geek to feed and a few evenings to kill, this is a great introduction to the fascinating world of code breaking. She gives a solid overview of cryptography and steganography, while delving deeper into specific topics ranging from anagrams and ROT13 to PGP and embedded data in graphics files.

It definitely doesn’t take a Comp Sci degree to understand the tutorial. It’s clearly written and the techniques can be mastered by anyone with a high school education. Do yourself a favor and take a peek at this code - it’ll blow your mind!

I used to be an incredibly religious person. My parents recently founded a college fellowship in Norfolk and back in the day I was a youth group leader. It wasn’t until around senior year in high school when I became disillusioned with organized religion. I simply refused to believe that all the gossiping, back-stabbing and self-righteous judging that I saw happening at church were a product of God. So I stopped going, and save for a couple of visits a year to support my parents, haven’t been back since.

Recently, the a decade-long scientific study commissioned to determine the healing power of prayer came to a close. The results indicated that patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered a significantly higher rate of health complications.

To all of my Christian comrades, I must ask: “How can you maintain your convictions in the face of evidence like this?”

I no longer buy the church’s bullshit. But I know what the church would say in response to this.

faith, n.
2. Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.

Sarah’s mom is in town visiting, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time this weekend wandering around the city. After a pan handler had approached us for change, she commented that Seattle seemed to have a lot of homeless people and that the city should do something about it.

I just did a few searches and discovered that even though Seattle is the 23rd largest city in the US by population, we’re 7th in terms of number of homeless.

Huh.

I went to school in Philly and I work in Pioneer Square, so I don’t really think twice about bums on the street. Still, I was a bit surprised by these statistics, especially considering Seattle’s liberal culture. This is purely conjecture, but perhaps its the liberal culture that’s the root of the high homeless rate. Seattle is a pretty tolerant city - maybe the stigma of living on the street is blunted here.