Black Holes and Snowy Mountains

Online banking has really taken off in recent years, and with it has come the rise of e-mail phishing scams. However, it doesn’t help that your own bank is compounding the problem instead of working towards a solution.

Phishing is the practice of conning an unsuspecting victim into giving away sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and banking details usually via fake e-mails. Phishing has gotten so bad that Robert Mueller, former head of the FBI, was nearly phished himself. The problem with phishing is that with a cursory glance the message and links provided look perfectly legitimate, which is exactly what the attacker relies on.
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I have been extremely lazy about attending concerts lately, which is sad because concert-going is the best way to experience the genre. Classical music is not only an auditory experience but a visual one as well- I love watching how each musician interacts with their instrument while being able to concentrate on the result of that action at the same time. When I was playing in the various orchestras I’ve been a member of, I remember picking up lots of little nuances from the BSO percussionists as well as my colleagues.
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As technology and styles progress, things inevitably get left in the dust. Here’s a short list of things being left by the wayside that deserve to be saved. Are you doing your part?

1. Backpacks

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To my pleasant surprise I logged into my Amazon Affiliates homepage today and saw that a few readers had made sales through the site.  Thank you to those who purchased through here!  I’m not really in this to make money; the affiliate links are the only advertisements you’ll find here and are simply a pointer to those who want to follow along or want something to listen to.  That being said, a few sales a month allow the site to break even and lets me know that at least a few people thought what I had to say was compelling.

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I paid my respects to the US’s WWII casualties a little early this year on a trip to Normandy last week. A friend and I took a battlefield tour of Utah and Omaha beach, ground zero for the American armed forces on D-Day in 1944. A partial list of sites we were fortunate to see (thanks for the pictures, Jennie!):

Angoville-au-Plain- A small church in an even smaller town (population: 46) a few miles from Utah beach housed a makeshift hospital run by Airborne medics Bob Wright and Ken Moore. Dedicated to St. Cosmas and St. Damien, the patron saints of Doctors and Physicians, only 2 soldiers died in the church and out of 80 that were treated. Many of the stain glass windows (replaced after the war) honor this impressive humanitarian achievement of these two medics.

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The other day I played around with Google’s “Trend” experiment for a while and thought it was really neat. You enter a search term and it shows how many searches for that term occurred over a given period of time (a few years). It’s still a little rough- for example, the coarse-graining doesn’t show a lot of detail when you decrease the time scale- but it’s still fun to see the patterns. Here are some that I put in the other day.

Politics

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As expected, Amazon introduced a large-screen version of the Kindle.  It’s got some new features that should have been incorporated into the original, namely native PDF viewing (without conversion).  It’s  got an auto-rotation feature much like what you find on the iPhone, iPod touch, and many digital cameras these days which seems practical on a larger screen (and in turn doesn’t make as much sense on the smaller Kindle 2).

My stance on Why the Paper Book Is Still Relevant has not changed, and the introduction of the Kindle DX raises new issues to go along with the old.

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News from the New York Times indicates that Amazon will be introducing a larger version of the highly successful Kindle eBook reader.

I wrote about Why the Paper Book is Still Relevant a while back, and I don’t think anything is changed with the introduction of a larger Kindle. While I could see Newspapers being OK on a grayscale display, I can’t help but wonder if magazines will make the transition as easily. Many magazines splurge on their colorful pages to draw a reader into a story, and some more popular titles like National Geographic can’t possibly be considering a major push towards Kindle readers due to the photographic (read: color) nature of their magazine.
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For those of you that missed it, Google’s homepage icon was a tribute to Samuel Morse yesterday (April 27).

Morse is credited with inventing the single-wire telegraph and the associated means of using it which became known as Morse Code.

Technorati Tags: Google, Morse, Morse Code, telegraph, birthday, April 27

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I’ve just returned from a wonderful 5-day trip to Rome and Florence. Weather was beautiful, crowds were present but nothing compared to what I imagine the height of tourist season is like, and the food was everything you’d expect from the Italians.

I’m sure nobody mistook me for a local, but I was frankly amazed at how blatantly some foreigners stick out against the normal tourist backdrop. I consider myself a relatively experienced traveler having journeyed through Europe and Asia, so I thought that I would offer a few tips on how to blend in. A lot of this might seem like common sense, but if that was the case I wouldn’t see these things being done time and time again.

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