Interesting article in Tuesday’s New York Times. Apparently, the Iraqi security forces have taken to using divining rods to search for explosives, against the advice of U.S. trainers and advisors.

The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.

When I was a child I would watch anything to do with science fiction. I don’t now, but, well, I still lean in that direction. I watch very little major-network television, and don’t really want to get hooked on a new series, but if it’s science fiction, I’m more likely to give it a try.

Many of you have probably heard about the Governator’s playing with steganography — specifically, an acrostic:

Terry Zink, a spam-fighter at Microsoft, recently blogged about remembering passwords. His problem, a problem most of us share, is how to strike a balance between using distinct passwords for different services, and remembering myriad passwords:

Why do I say this? While we should always use good passwords (like letter/number combinations, nothing obvious like “123456” and “password”), it’s completely unrealistic to have different passwords for every site if you have a very wide reach on the web.

Around three and a half years ago, I posted an item in my personal blog about public key infrastructure.^[1] In it, I mentioned two certificate authorities from which one could get free certificates for personal use: Thawte and CAcert.

Suppose that when you started your car today, it displayed a question on the dashboard: “Should I advance the timing by 4 degrees?” The car wouldn’t go until you responded. What would you think?

What if you were having a house built, and the builder sent you a text message: “Should we put your floor joists 16 inches on center? I need an answer immediately, or my workers are going to another job.” Would you know how to respond, without asking any questions back and risking losing the day?

How about if you tried to visit a web site, and your browser responded with a popup that said, “There’s a problem with the site’s certificate. Should I accept it anyway?”

When I worked for IBM, I didn’t use Skype. As with many large companies, they don’t allow the use of software on company computers unless the lawyers have approved the terms and conditions — the end-user license agreement, EULA — and the company lawyers didn’t approve the Skype license. It didn’t matter much to me: I had a Cisco IP telephone on my desk, and software on my computer to control the phone. I could make and receive calls from my computer as though I were at my desk.

In the issue dated 10 October, Science News reports on a study that suggests that peer reviewers prefer positive results:

A few years ago, I was spending a good bit of my time on context-based services. User context — also called “presence” — is information, which changes over time, about the current state of a user or other thing (it could be a car, say, or a sensor, or a computer system; the presence people call it a “presentity”).

Over at Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer agree with Language Log’s Mark Liberman in his admonition against the use of “generic plurals” in science reporting.