This is my pulled pork taco recipe, which has got me nearly universal praise (the only exception being some friends who eat kosher who couldn't praise it for obvious reasons).

I don't think I'd trust quantum randomness to generate cryptographically secure passwords or encryption keys. At least not for anything important.

Here's the problem. When you use quantum randomness, you are giving demons a perfect opportunity to sabotage you. Ok, let's step back, because you're probably saying "What the..." right now.

Of course, we don't know that demons exist. Let's face it, scientific investigations into supernatural beings have consistently shown no evidence of them. So, if demons do exist, their effects are going to be subject to the laws of physics; thus, the only chance they have to manipulate things in the real world is through non-deterministic processes. That means quantum effects.

Furthermore, whatever effect they have has to also obey quantum probabilities (otherwise it would be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics, which is a statistical law, yes, but if demons made a habit of breaking it, we'd notice). This severely limits what the hypothetical quantum demons could do. Because of the second law, quantum effects rarely come into play in the macroscopic world.

But it can become an issue when scientists start rigging the real world to react to quantum effects. The classic thought experiment is, of course, Schrödinger's cat. (Briefly, the scientist puts a cat in a box with a vial or poison gas. The vial is hooked up to a Geiger counter, and will release its gas if the Geiger counter detects an alpha particle. The counter is aimed at a sample that has a 50% chance of releasing a an alpha particle in one hour.) Now, suppose a scientist sets up a Schrödinger's cat experiment. And condsider that there is no scientific test that can distinguish between a natural random decay and a demon-manipulated decay. This means, if there is a demon who really, really hates that cat, then that cat is pretty much dead meat. (Well, it's not dead meat until the scientist opens the box and observes it, but you get the idea.)

The only limitation that a demon has is that, if the scientist decides to run 100 Schrödinger's cat experiments, the demon will have to keep the results to around 50 alive / 50 dead. If the demon hates all cats then there's not much it can do, it can only kill about half of them. However, if the demon hates just one cat, you can bet that cat will be among the dead.

Now, instead of this silly cat experiment, let's say we're using quantum randomness to generate encryption keys to secure important data. A demon wanting to sabotage your data security can potentially manipulate the random values to introduce a weakness into the key.

Now, I'm not saying demons exist. They probably don't. But still, if I had something really important hanging in the balance, I'm not so sure I'd trust demons not to exist.

Note: I'm only being half tongue-in-cheek about this.

I don't really think there are demons manipulating quantum interactions. But if push comes to shove, and something really, really important is on the line, this is something I would think about when choosing a strategy. If I needed an absolutely secure key to stop a nuclear missle launch, I'm not so sure I'd trust a quantum random key when a deterministic, pseudo-random key can be nearly as secure.

On the other hand, if the situation were dire, let's say maybe I was trying to brute force a password override to stop the nuclear launch, I'd maybe consider using quantum random values while praying that a benevolenet demon could help find the code faster.

I, having been myself for more than 3 and a half decades, have learned a few things about myself. One thing being, I am very good at abstention but very bad at moderation. For this reason there are many things I refuse to do even once, for fear that I might become hooked and have to face the looming burden of abstaining since I don't trust myself to moderate.

Here's a short list of those things.

• Alcohol
• Any other drug prone to habit-forming
• Multiplayer online games
• Any sleeping pill at all
• Golf
• Sudoku

A lot of times, people on the Internet (and sometimes even in real life), when lamenting some defect in humanity will begin their sentence with the word "Americans", as if Americans are the only people in the world who have questionable societal weaknesses.

Normally I roll my eyes at this. People are people everywhere, and a lot of "America's weaknesses" are really humanity's.

However, culture is also culture, and different cultures are different, so there are bound to be some things America really is bad at. Here are a couple examples I could think of.

• Schooling. The American educational system isn't bad, per se. We hear a lot of the stories we hear about Taiwanese and German kids learning differential equations in third grade when American kids struggle with adding fractions, but those stories are usually missing some vitally important context (like, for example, maybe the Taiwanese kids have no humanities, art, or history, and represent only the top 2%).

  However, one aspect where Amercian schooling just sucks is the emphasis on obedience, and absolute trust in the instructor. I believe this creates an attitude in Americans that authority is something that must be placated at all times. This carries over to real life. I've noticed that a lot of Americans completely overestimate the risk of confronting management.

  Other countries don't seem to have this issue. People seem to have enjoyed schooling more in other countries, and be more at ease at their work.

• Geography. I don't really think this is the educational system's fault. We do a reasonable job teaching geography, but for cultural reasons Americans don't retain it, whereas they do much better in other countries. This, I believe, is mostly due to the fact that it doesn't really matter much what direction you are heading in in America, you will end up in a place that speaks the same language and has more or less the same culture, except near somet of the borders.

• Freeway driving. European philosophy tends to favor not hard limits on speed, as we do in America, but on obeying respectful driving rules such as never cruising in the left lane and not tailgating.

  Street driving, however, is another matter entirely.

• Another thing that Americans do on the road that is beyond retarded is to merge a mile ahead of a merge point. People who merge early will then get mad when someone who isn't retarded decides to drive down the lane everyone is getting out of.

  Studies have shown that staying in lane and zippering at the merge point will get more cars through the merge faster, and cause traffic to back up less. But that's beside the point. The point is, Americans get irrirated at "cheaters" that they are deliberately enabling. If everyone just stayed in their lane and zippered at the merge point, nobody could "cheat".

  In Europe, people zipper at merges.

File this one under the "Is this the kind of thing you spend your time thinking about?" files. I don't care. It bothers me.

If someone close to you dies, do you miss them? If someone you like can't make it to an event you're attending, do you miss them? Of course you do.

So why, if you miss them, do you say, "You will be missed", instead of "I will miss you"? What, are you afraid to commit to it or something? You miss this person, wish they were here, but you can't even muster the never to say it in the active voice.

And don't give be any bull like, "Well, I was just saying it's generally true and is not specific to me." Pshaw. You can say, "We'll all miss you", or, "Everyone will miss you", and not have to be a generalizing non-commital pussy.

So the next time you miss someone, say it, and own it, and don't just generalize.

The other day I was looking for a B read (I was in the middle of my A read) and pondering what I should start on next, began to think about what books I'd be embarrassed if it were revealed that I'd never read it.

Of course, the obvious thing to do in that situation is to make a list and post it publicly on the Internet, so everyone can see what I have never read.

• Dune, Frank Herbert
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain. (In fact other than a couple short stories I've read almost nothing by Twain.)
• The Odyssey, Homer
• Something by Ayn Rand
• Something by Nietzsche
• Something by Lovecraft

It was almost painful to think about the situation of admitting I'd never read Dune. That one I'm taking care of right it now.

The Mark Twain was is pretty painful as well. I have to give America its props. America, you may have noticed, doesn't have too many classic writers compared to England. (I believe this is because America was nation-building for its first hundred or so years and had not a many resources to devote to more artistic endeavors. By the time America came into its own as a civilized country, the art form that was drawing all the talent was cinema.) So I really have to read one of the few American authors who can hold his own with the greats.

Ayn Rand and Nietzsche are authors I don't expect to agree with much (except for that irritating little "grain of truth" you know you can't argue with), but part of being well-rounded is exposure to ideas you might not agree with.

With all the talk about Game of Thrones lately, which is a series I haven't read and/or seen, I thought it wouldn't be too weird if I wrote a post about another fantasy series I got sucked into, namely the Kingkiller Chronicle, by Patrick Rothfuss.

However, the post is extraordinarily long so I've tagged it as not appearing in the main blog.

Click here for the full version.

Here is the tl;dr version:

• There are three races: Ruach, Fairies, and Men. Fairies and Ruach are the same species; Fairies are Ruach that have been changed into a new race by Shaping magic.
• The Shapers created the Faen Realm as a playbox. Iax stole the moon into the playbox and that started the Creation War.
• The Stormwal mountains are the front of the Creation War. To the west is the Ergen Empire, the Shapers domain, populated entirely by Ruach. To the east is the Knowers Domain, which may be populated by Ruach, but the bulk of the armies is Men.
• The Knowers' goal is to attack Fae, steal the moon back, and destroy the Fae, and the Ergen empire, but the war never actually made it to the Faen Realm, because it was necessary to conquer all of Ergen first.
• The Knowers dominate the war until the appearance of Lanre, who turns the tide.
• Some time after Drossen Tor, Lanre begins to conspire with seven others (inlucing Lyra) against the Empire.
• Lyra changes her mind, and Lanre kills her in his rage.
• Lanre speaks tries to get a panacea from the Ctheah and ends up with great power, but can't resurrect Lyra, and falls into despair.
• Lanre and the Chandrian betray seven cities to the enemy. One city (the city Lyra would have betrayed, Antus, located in present-day Yll) does not fall and the empire is left with hope.
• The Chandrian set themselves up as kings of the conquered lands. Yll is protected by the Amyr and Singers. The Creation War becomes a stalemate.
• Yll becomes a civilized society, inventing writing (Yllish knots).
• At some point, a revolutionary called Taborlin the Great arises in the eastern part of Chandrian lands, and is the first person who is able to defeat the Chandrian, using Shaping magic, and the amazing thing is that he is a human rather than a Ruach.
• Taborlin frees Tinue, which is henceforth called the Free City, creates a Lockless box the holds the Chandrian's former power, and establishes the Lockless Line.
• The Chandrian can no longer rule openly and must now strike like lightning from a clear blue sky.
• Humans in the lands freed by Taborlin begin to make strides in civilization, invent more convenient writing, and quickly overtake Yll in power and knowledge.
• At beginning of known written history, Ceald develops currency, the Aturan Empire is founded, and the map gels into the form we know today.
• Wary of the threat posed by Atur, the Amyr use backhanded tactics to gain influence in Aturan empire (namely, they set themselves up as an organization connected to the Tehlin church that had autonomous power in the Aturan empire).
• When the Aturan empire collapsed, the Amyr went back to being a secret organization.

I recently think I put my finger on what makes Jane Austen so great, and I did it by comparing her to John Steinbeck, in particular, his novel East of Eden.

East of Eden follows the lives two families in living in the Salinas Valley: the Hamiltons and the Trasks. The Hamiltons are based on Steinbeck's own family on his mother's side (in fact, Steinbeck himself appears in a few scenes as a child). The Trasks, however, are purely fictional.

Steinbeck is not quite at the level of the great classic writers, and East of Eden belies this fact, in my opinion, but in a fascinating way. Comparing the scenes that focus on the Trasks to those that focus on the Hamiltons, it's hard to imagine that they take place in the same universe. The events in the Hamiltons' lives, based on the lives of real people, seem highly familiar and realistic. A few scenes really hit home compared to my own life, such as the scene after Sam Hamilton fainted and his family realized he was getting too old for farm life, and they were all passing a bottle of liquor around deciding what to do.

The Trasks, however, live in a world of subtle fantasy. It's not that the events in their lives weren't real things that happen to people (although there were several events more sensational than most families ever have to deal with). No, the subtle fantasy comes from how the events were arranged to provide a cosmic meaning to the whole thing. Real lives have no comic meaning (that we can discern, anyway), they just happen. Real lives don't have foreshadowing, don't follow a three-act structure, and don't use arc words. The Trasks lives had all these things, and so they seemed fictional compared to the Hamiltons.

I want to point out that this something I felt first, then analysed later. It's the sort of thing that seems bit odd and uncanny while reading, but one doesn't identify the discrepancy until reflecting on the story afterward. I'm fairly certain Steinbeck wasn't doing this on purpose (if he had been I suspect he would have done things to make the contrast more apparent, but who knows?), and that's where he belies his not-quite-among-the-greatest writing ability.

Jane Austen, however, achieves this level of complete realism, but with characters that are completely fictional. I realized that I'd had the same reactions to scenes in Emma and Pride and Prejudice as I'd had to scenes of the Hamiltons in East of Eden, and that's when I realized just how life-like Austen's characters and situations are. For instance, I was awed by the familiarity of the scene when Lizzy and Jane had to correct their mother on aspects of English law. Scenes like this show Austen almost casually finding that familiarity of daily life in her fictional characters that Steinbeck could only find the ones he based on real life.

Oftentimes it's hard to see what makes a particular creator great. But then you reflect on the their works a bit, analyse them a bit, compare and constrast them to other works, and suddenly they rise up to reveal their greatness. It always amazes when that happens.

I found proof of aliens visiting Earth! Here is a photograph capturing an Alien Spaceship on Google Steet View as it flies over the Mackenzie River in northern Canada.

https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=61.258486%2C-117.52821&spn=8.245399%2C14.523926&t=m&z=6&layer=c&cbll=61.258486%2C-117.52821&panoid=Zg-HFrYdW-i-vuleVlgJMQ&cbp=12%2C293.49%2C%2C2%2C-4.05

Seriously, it was kind of exciting. I sometimes see cool images on Google street view and wonder how people found them. Now I've found one.

I wanted to write a note about one thing that annoys me in Firefox. I've found out that I like this feature called "Application Tabs" or "Pinned Tabs", where you choose a tab and to be permanently displayed, but with only an icon and no close button.

The tabs have a few deal-breaker problems, though.

1. They sporadically disappear on restart

2. If I click on a link to an external site in an application tab, it will load the external site in the application tab, rather than a new tab. This makes it "not actually an application tab".

   I realize that it's not always straightforward to know whether a new page is part of the same website or not, but web pages with a different hostname or top-level domain name are part of a different site the vast majority of the time. And a pattern match can be used for advanced users who want finer control.

3. If you are looking at a page in an application tab, and you use the browser's URL bar or search bar to go to another site, it loads the new location in the app tab. This is unforgivable. With an embedded link there's some question whether the link points a new site or not; if you go through the URL bar it's obviously a new site and should load in a new tab.

This might be the thing that could push me over to Chrome, if if turns out its application tabs behave better than Firefox's.