Tag Archives: en

Take responsibility for your food!

This is a great book for all you vegans and vegetarians out there: The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability by Lierre Keith. I cannot state it as elegantly and simply, so go read the book, whether you are vegetarian or not. And then grow up and take the responsibility.

“…for someone to live, someone else has to die.”

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A-ha! Aerobics and sleep!

When it comes to curbing hunger, aerobic exercise, like running on a treadmill, is more effective than non-aerobic activities, such as weightlifting. So says a study in American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.

Actually, sleep has a lot to do with ghrelin too. Previous research reveals not getting enough sleep boosts ghrelin levels and increases hunger and appetite, which can contribute to weight gain and obesity. Just another reason why getting sufficient sleep is a good idea!… -->

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Biometrics is not for authentication, folks!

The capacity of people to persist in their delusions never seizes to amaze me.

A yet another researcher is wondering why biometric authentication does not work: “Ten to twenty per cent of utterances collected by voice biometrics systems are not strong identifiers of the individual that spoke them…”, says Dr. Clive Summerfield.

There is a serious problem with biometrics, and maybe this problem is not voiced sufficiently loud, since we have the same thing again and again. The problem is: biometric characteristics cannot be changed. Everybody knows that, right? The logical consequence of that is: the biometric data can be successfully used to identify a person but cannot be used to authenticate a person. Let me repeat that:

The biometric data can be used to identify but not to authenticate a person.

It works very well as a means of identifying someone and that is how we used it for so many years quite successfully (what do you think your picture in the passport is?) But in order to use it to authenticate a person, to be an authentication token, the person must be able to change it. Must be able to change the biometric data, period. There is no other way. And almost all research in biometrics rotates around this silly subject: how to change the immutable? After twenty years of this circus it should be obvious to everyone and their dog but no-o-o…

Biometric data is successfully used for identification for thousands of years precisely because it is difficult to change. And biometric data could never be used for authentication because it is so hard to change. It is that simple and still we have hundreds of people around the globe deny the obvious.

Here is a simple rule of thumb: if a “security specialist” talks about providing authentication based on biometric data – run for your life!… -->

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Where will you get a good TV?

I am looking at the reports for TV sales for the last quarter of the last year comparing it to the previous year. What most analysts are interested in is the amount of shipments and how good LCD compared to other technologies is doing and why there is a little decline in TV shipments and things like that.

I am looking at it and I am feeling very sad. Here is why. The best TV manufacturers are historically Japanese. We may argue about it all day long but you would never call a Sony TV set “bad”, would you? Same goes for Sharp. The best two manufacturers of TVs in history of flat panels. And so I am very sad to see how they keep shrinking away under the pressure of their cheap-junk-TV competition. Sad, sad story. Where will you get your TV in 10 years if all you will have is junk, eh?

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xkcd on pickup artists, negging and life

Excellent:

You look like you are going to spend your life having one epiphany after another, always thinking you’ve finally figured out what’s holding you back, and how you can be productive and crerative and turn your life around.
But nothing will ever change. That cycle of mediocrity isn’t due to some obstacle. It’s who you are.
The thing standing in the way of your dreams is that the person having them is you.

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