Reflections on 23500

Today I'm 23500 days old and I was looking around to see if there was any significance to this number. It's factors are unremarkable (2^2 x 5^3 x 47) but the fact that it's halfway between 23000 and 24000 means that it pops up quite frequently in Internet searches, as would 22500 or 24500 I would imagine. A search reveals that the approximate population of Boston in 1620 was 23500 and there are several towns around the world that are listed as having this population currently e.g. Bishopbriggs in Scotland.

Bishopbriggs grew from a small rural village on the old road from Glasgow to Kirkintilloch and Stirling during the 19th century, eventually growing to incorporate the adjacent villages of Auchinairn, Cadder, Jellyhill and Mavis Valley. It currently has a population of approximately 23,500 people.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishopbriggs

It turns out that Mount Isa has the same population (source):

Mount Isa is located just 200 kilometres from the Northern Territory border and 1,829 kilometres from Queensland’s capital, Brisbane. The nearest major city, Townsville, can be found 883 kilometres from The Isa. Mount Isa covers an area of over 43,310 square kilometres, making it geographically the second largest city in Australia to Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia ... With a population of approximately 23,500, Mount Isa is a major service centre for north-west Queensland.

Many other examples of towns having populations of about 23500 could be quoted. In addition of populations, the number sometimes comes up as a dollar figure (source):

In its third annual funding cycle, the Black Philanthropy Initiative has pumped $23,500 back into the Winston-Salem area to help African Americans improve their parenting skills.

Interestingly, it turns out that the centre of the Sun is about 23500 times more distant from us than the centre of the Earth (source).

The sun is far enough away (about 23,500 earth radii) that it took a long time before people knew accurately how far away the sun was. Certainly the ancient Greeks had calculated the distance, but they also knew that their results could be off. 

Many countries in the world have five digit postal codes or zip codes as they are sometimes known. These codes identify particular locations within the country e.g. Muang Prachinburi, Prachinburi, Thailand has a postcode of 23500. The United States uses a five digit system but apparently there is no location corresponding to 23500, although there is for 23499 and 23501. 

Learning English - A Syllable at a Time in Rhyme

Sometime ago, it occurred to me that an effective way to teach English to non-native speakers would be to start with words of one syllable that rhyme. I don't have any research to support the idea but it seems like it would be easy and fun, as opposed to some of the dreadful approaches to learning the language adopted by institutions like English First. Maybe later, when I've retired from formal teaching, I can experiment with this approach in Indonesia.

For the time being, I'll use this blog to refine my ideas. I'm going to begin with the root sound ake that we find in words like bake and cake. It's a good place to start because this sound is fairly well-behaved, meaning that it doesn't change its sound within different words. Other root sounds such as own that we find in words like grown and sown can be confusing because the same three letters can appear in words like crown and town and be pronounced quite differently. 

My approach will be to follow the letters of the alphabet sequentially from a to z, noting as many monosyllabic words as I myself know. I'm deliberately avoiding finding all possible words because I want to stick with words that are in common use. I'll refer to proper names as well because these will be probably be encountered by the language student. Any exceptions to the pronounciation will be noted as well as any alternative spellings.

In the case of ake, the very first letter of the alphabet presents as with an exception but only one of spelling. A type of pain or discomfort can be described as an ache and in fact a common expression is aches and pains. After this however, it's all smooth sailing with bake, blake, brake, break, cake, drake, fake, flake, jake, lake, make, quake, rake, sake, shake, snake, stake, steak, take, wake. These words are all widely used and I won't formally define them here (any dictionary can do that) but instead I'll make some comment or illustrate the use of the word in some common expressions.

1. You can bake a cake.
   
   
2. Blake is a proper name used as a first name for males e.g. Blake Carrington or as a last name e.g. William Blake.
   
   
3. You can brake sharply to avoid a collision when you're driving. The car's brakes are what helps you avoid a collision.
   
   
4. You can break a bone if you don't brake quickly enough in the car you're driving and have an accident. In this case, break and brake have the same pronunciation. In the common word breakfast however, the break part is pronounced differently (like eck). If you have a break from work, it means you have a rest.
   
   
5. You can cake your face with make-up or bake a cake but, to quote a common expression, you can't have your cake and eat it too.
   
   
6. A drake is a male duck but it's also a popular surname e.g. Francis Drake.
   
   
7. You can fake an injury or you can spot a fake banknote if you look at it carefully.
   
   
8. Flake: have as much chance as a snow flake in hell, then you have no chance at all really.
   
   
9. Jake is common first name for males e.g. Jake Gyllenhaal.
   
   
10. Lake Baikal is the most voluminous freshwater lake in the world and is the deepest lake in the world at 1,642.
    
    
11. Make: you can make hay while the sun shines. Dirty Harry said go ahead punk, make my day.
    
    
12. You may quake in fear when the werewolves are near.
    
    
13. You can rake the leaves on your lawn, gather them up and use them as compost.
    
    
14. For the sake of your health, you might avoid getting too stressed out about work.
    
    
15. You might shake a bottle of juice to remove the sediment from the bottom.
    
    
16. A snake in the grass is a person who is not be trusted because he or she could turn treacherous.
    
    
17. Your reputation could be at stake if you are found to be dishonest. Vampires are commonly disposed of by means of a stake through the heart.
    
    
18. A steak is part of the flesh of a dead animal that is cooked and eaten by those who enjoy such food.
    
    
19. Take away food is becoming increasingly popular in our fast-paced society.
    
    
20. A wake is often held when somebody dies. You wake up in the morning when your alarm goes off.

Hiding files in Flickr pics will fool web censors

This article is copied from New Scientist:

Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.

Collage relies on a well-established technique known as digital steganography, in which an image file is changed to encode the hidden message without obviously affecting the appearance of the image. A prototype version is due to be unveiled on Friday, 13 August.

Steganography normally requires specialist software, but Collage is designed so that anti-censorship activists and readers can publish and download the hidden stories without any specialist skills. A publisher or activist can, for example, use Collage to copy news stories from a website and embed the articles into Flickr images in a process that is almost entirely automated.

In the prototype, stories from the BBC news site are used, but in principle any web content could be hidden. Collage can hide as many as 15 news articles in just seven medium-sized Flickr images.

Once the material is embedded in a Flickr image, anyone with Collage can download it and extract the stories. A censor attempting to monitor traffic from a prohibited site would only see the reader visiting Flickr, which is not generally blocked by web censors.

Collage is able to identify which images have been used to hide material. All the would-be reader has to do is click on the date they are interested in; the stories appear a few minutes later. "It all happens in the background," says Sam Burnett at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, part of the team behind Collage.

Burnett has designed a Flickr upload tool that links with Collage and embeds content that publishers or activists want to make available.

Collage can also be easily extended so that stories are embedded in other photo-sharing sites. The idea is to spread material across numerous sites that host user-generated content so that the activity of someone running Collage appears much like that of any internet user and the censors cannot just block access to Flickr. Collage does, however, rely on the goodwill of Flickr users, who will have to provide access to the images where the articles are to be hidden.

Burnett is relying on opposition to censorship to motivate people to use Collage. "We're betting on people getting a warm fuzzy feeling because they are beating censorship," he says.

To coincide with the launch of the prototype, Burnett will present a paper on the system at the USENIX Security Symposium in Washington DC.

E-books

The site bookworm can be used to store ebooks that, once uploaded, can be downloaded later to any device or read online. The books have to be the epub format but programs like calibre can be used to create the proper format if the book is in a non-compatible format. This is not a bad idea and obviates the need to carry your library around with you on your laptop, mobile device or USB stick drive. Today I created an account with bookworm and uploaded my first ebook (Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake). All went well.

Dead Flash Drive

Oh dear, my recently acquired 16Gb Kingston Traveller Flash Drive is no longer working. It's recognised by my computer but when I try to access it, I'm asked if I want to format it. Accepting that whatever I had on the disk would be erased, I choose the formatting option but the operation always fails. I decided to try a low level format and to that end downloaded a little utility program from the Internet at http://hddguru.com. No go. It would appear that the drive is irretrievably dead.

From this experience, I have learned a valuable lesson. It's silly to buy a larger and more expensive flash drive, as I did, only to see it die a couple of months later. I've now revived my older 4Gb Toshiba flash drive and will begin storing my portable applications on this. As far as possible, I'll use the Internet to store any files that I need to access or work on. I'll make regular copies of the contents of the drive so that it ever fails again I can quickly copy the contents to a new drive.

Microsoft Security Essentials

I'm trying to kick start this blog as I did my other, so here goes. I came across Yogesh Mankani's review of ten free Microsoft products and noticed that one of them was an anti-malware download called Microsoft Security Essentials that requires validation before it can be installed. Seeing that I have a legal installation of Vista, I thought I'd test it out so I downloaded and installed it, then ran quick scan that didn't detect any problems. I wasn't surprised at this because I have Windows Defender and McAfee antivirus already activated.

However, I was surprised later when I opened Windows Media Player and got an alert about a TrojanDownloader: ASX/Wimad.CJ that was lurking in one of my Windows Media files that I'd downloaded in August 2007 from Limewire. The threat was flagged as severe so I removed it and then did a little investigation. According to Microsoft's Malware Protection Centre it isn't actually a trojan but instead:

TrojanDownloader:ASX/Wimad.CJ is a detection for malicious Windows media files that encourage users to download and execute arbitrary files on an affected machine. When opened with Windows Media Player, these malicious files open a particular URL in a Web browser.

Installation

TrojanDownloader:ASX/Wimad.CJ is a malicious Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) file, which when opened by Windows Media Player, urges a user to download and execute an arbitrary file. In the wild, files detected as TrojanDownloader:ASX/Wimad.CJ have been observed to be distributed with file extensions such as .MP3, .ASF, .WMA, and .ASX. The file names used have been varied and enticing.

Payload

Redirects Web traffic. At the time of writing, ASX/Wimad.CJ attempts to open a page on the www.realcodec.comdomain. Affected users may be directed to other sites or to download arbitrary files.  Microsoft strongly suggest that users avoid downloading and executing any files when prompted by Windows Media Player upon opening streaming format files.

So the program has proved useful already but I was unsure what the difference was between Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows Defender until I came across this article.

Q: How is Microsoft Security Essentials different from Windows Defender?

A: Windows Defender detects and removes known spyware only. It is not designed to protect against the full breadth of malicious software, and specifically does not prevent viruses, worms, Trojans, and other malicious software from infecting your machine. The new no-cost solution will be a comprehensive anti-malware solution.

Q: Is Microsoft Security Essentials designed to replace Windows Defender?

A: No but if you are running Microsoft Security Essentials, you do not need to run Windows Defender. Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to disable Windows Defender in order to manage the PC’s real-time protection, including anti-virus, rootkits, Trojans and spyware.

Q: Does installing Microsoft Security Essentials disable Windows Defender? 

A: Microsoft Security Essentials should disable Windows Defender on Vista and Windows 7 and uninstall it from XP. In some cases, this does not happen automatically.

Q: Do I need to manually disable or uninstall Windows Defender if I am using Microsoft Security Essentials?

A: If Microsoft Security Essentials did not automatically disable Windows Defender on Vista or Windows 7, you should disable it to prevent conflicts. Windows Defender cannot be uninstalled from Vista or Windows 7. 

If Microsoft Security Essentials did not automatically uninstall Windows Defender on XP, you should manually uninstall Windows Defender via Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs.

Q: What happens if I do not disable or uninstall Windows Defender if I am using Microsoft Security Essentials?

A: If Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows Defender are both running, your system may experience performance degradation and other problems caused by the conflict of two services providing real time protection simultaneously.

I'm testing out (behind the goddam Great Wall) post.ly that's owned by Posterous and being promoted as a dead simple way to post to Twitter.

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