Disregard, for a second, that the APS will accept anything, but does this abstract seem obviously quacktacular to you? (compare it to the first link)

As someone who does not keep current with the study of dark matter, I can tell that there are still some obvious glaring problems here, but maybe to the casual glance.. it seems like it could be valid?

But...

This guy tried to get a poster in at the conference I'm currently at and was denied a spot after peer review of his abstract. Instead, he purchased space in the exhibition hall and set up his poster there. In effect, he's paying extra money to bypass peer review and get his poster into the conference, even though it's set up in a completely different area than everyone else's. I feel kind bad for the guy, since the legitimate exhibitors were all making jokes at his expense, and everyone who saw him there pieced together immediately why his poster wasn't in with the rest...

The gist of the poster is that you can demonstrate the existence of cold dark matter in space by looking at light traveling in the red shift direction of the cosmic microwave background versus light traveling in some other direction and infer the presence of a resistive medium (insert segue here) and that must be cold dark matter. If this sounds familiar and conjures up words like phlogiston or luminiferous aether, it's because this idea was proven false conclusively long long ago in one of the most famous paradigm shifts in physics. Essentially, this guy is a slightly more complicated and modern version of turtles all the way down.

Just to be safe, I brought Laura with me to see the poster. She's a postdoc at LANL studying dark matter via the detection of neutrinos. She knows the field, and immediately pronounced this guy's work complete crack-pottery.

Just for kicks, I had a look at the poster in depth. I was so blown away by how bad it was that I had to take pictures of it. Here's what I assume is a diagram of his apparatus:

click to embiggen

I love that he lists the Radio Shack part numbers for everything.

And just in case you were wondering, he did remember to separate the water tanks by "130cm in both channels to de-calibrate the AdS time metric tensors." Furthermore, "the critical points are dilation conformal anomalies causing the sidereal data to exist." Yes.

Confused? Here, this plot will clear things up for you.

OMGWTFBBQ

Maybe it's a joke? It's like some weird game of Physics Buzzword Bingo. Every time he says sidereal, you have to drink.

It's not a photoshop job, it's part of life imitates xkcd. Apparently there's a fair amount of this shenaniganry going on.

My horrible struggles continue; I've been forced to change my base of operations to Waikiki, where I will be subjected to sunsets like this on a daily basis:

Speaking of sunsets, I was just talking with Ben and Kate about green flashes and how none of us had ever seen one. Well, I've been trying to take a picture of one for a long long time. Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your viewing pleasure... a very poor picture of a green flash:

Aside from cropping, this picture hasn't been altered at all and is at 100% zoom (hence the grain). My point-and-shoot isn't very good at focusing on a small bright point on a dark background, nor did I have control over the shutter speed to get the flash less blown out. But I assure you it was quite green to the eye. They do exist, Colson!

No one around me on the beach seemed to recognize the novelty of this. Maybe it's old hat around here.

This is the sunrise this morning as seen from the roof of an abandoned WWII pillbox near the top of a steep basalt ridge overlooking Lanikai Beach. The two islands shown here are the Mokuluas, about three quarters of a mile offshore. It's a little tough to tell at this resolution, but just to the right of the sun is the distant island of Molokai. Lanai and Maui were also visible in the clear morning air.

My plan for tomorrow is to rent a kayak and go out to the Mokuluas.

I have a folding knife that I sometimes carry around, but I haven't been able to find it recently. Today I was rooting around in my laptop bag and there it was. The blade is about 3" long and the entire thing, handle and all, is made of steel (it's this one). My laptop bag was my carry-on for my flight last week.

The lady who scanned my bag did put it through for a second scan, but decided it wasn't worth inspection. How do you miss that?? I'm glad she did, since I didn't know it was in there and probably would have had to forfeit it, but still... damn. I know that a lot of what the TSA does is for spectacle and not really a win for physical security, but the X-ray machines do actually work. And its not like the lady just spaced out while my bag went through; she thought she saw something, and put the bag through a second time to confirm. So what happened?

On Wednesday morning, I flew to San Diego to take part in a workshop on silicon reverse engineering. I intentionally took the early flight out, leaving at 0600h and arriving in California at 0930. This left most of the rest of the day to hang out with Ben, a friend who I hadn't seen since college. He had the day off from work, which apparently involves oncology, so the two of us drove up into the mountains and did a quick hike up to the summit of Mt. Gardner.

Colson at the summit. The coastal fog/low clouds got right up to where we were and then disappeared.

I hiked briefly on the Pacific Crest Trail, the views were great, and there was a lot of wind.

A LOT of wind.

Today was the workshop, during which we examined how one might attack a "cryptographically secure" EEPROM to retrieve the wooo secret contents (actually, in this case, we were writing to the password-protected memory region). The chip in question for this exercise was an Infineon (formerly Siemens) part frequently used in smart cards.

Like this one, for instance.

The course instructors, one of whom was Bunnie, a friend of mine from MIT, had taken the liberty of cutting up a few smart cards, retrieving the dice, and rebonding them into 8-pin DIP packages to make them easier to work with. But first, they took some ultra-high resolution photographs of the die and blew them up into posters for us to examine closeup.

All the CMOS you can eat.

We did a quick crash course on how to identify different types of gates in photos of dice like this, how they go about decapsulating a die from its package, and how you might go about finding and exploiting security weaknesses based on what you see. The end result for this particular chip was that you could write to it if you had the right password, and by grounding a particular trace on the die, the chip would always think you had the right password--furthermore, it would allow you to read the memory locations that held the password. A very simple (and ghetto) apparatus was assembled to apply ground to the correct location:

Not expensive.

The little probe needle is less than one micron across at the end. A 3D micrometer positioning system was used to get it into the correct spot while looking down at the die through a microscope.

Teeny.

Grounding the right pad triggered the correct nMOS transistor which, in turn, signaled the data latch that the chip was in a mode that should allow the reading of the password memory address. Then we just passed the normal commands to the chip through the serial interface pin (rigged up with an 8bit Atmel MCU to act as a poor-man's smart card reader), and the chip happily spit out its secret encrypted password. At that point, it was possible to remove the probe and write to the card as normal, since we now had the correct password. In the case of the Kinkos/FedEx copy card that this chip came from, the lack of real security could result in... <dramatic chord> stolen photocopies. But consider that chips like this are also showing up in your credit cards, and perhaps you'll have a moment of pause.

There is, once again, hot water. Fixing the problem involved two things: a new thermocouple and a new valve insert of some kind. Total parts cost was only $10, so that's not so bad. The plumber mentioned how annoying it was that whoever installed the existing water heater used all rigid pipe for both water and gas, making replacement a real pain. He said it would cost $900-$1100 to get a new one put in. But luckily, he said I don't seem to need a new one. We didn't hear any indication that tank fouling was getting to be a problem, so it probably has years of life left.

By the time I get home from work, I should have 50 gallons of piping hot water at my disposal and it is my full intention to take the longest shower ever.

Oh where, oh where can it be?

Water heater shut down sometime Thursday night. Friday's shower was decidedly luke. Pilot light was off; following the instructions for relighting had no effect.

None of the five plumbers operating in the Los Alamos area work on weekends, or holidays. So my calls weren't returned until this morning (Tuesday). And when they called, four of the five gave me lead times of 2-3 weeks on service calls. Apparently there is a drastic shortage of plumbers in this area. The fifth company said they could come out on Thursday morning, but that if it turns out that I need a new water heater rather than some simple fix, it'll be 2-3 weeks before they can do work like that.

Great. So at a minimum I'll have gone for a week without a warm shower. Mike agreed to let me shower over at his place so that I don't have to keep heating water on the stove and giving myself sponge baths. Ugh.

For a long time, the only topographic maps available for download into hand held GPS receivers were at the 100,000:1 scale, based on the USGS maps of the same resolution. This level of detail is fine if you're driving or flying, but it is really insufficient for hiking. The USGS also has complete coverage of the USA at the 24,000:1 level (the so-called "7 minute quads"), and this is a much more useful resolution for hiking-based outdoor activities. Yet, despite the marketing of both Garmin and Magellan hand held GPS units as hiking gear, neither company released 24,000:1 data for a long time.

This is somewhat understandable in their legacy units, because they were low on memory. When I bought my first GPSr in early 2003 (a Garmin eTrex Vista; top of the line for hand-held units at the time), it only had 24 MB of memory. This was sufficient to hold about half of New Mexico at 100,000:1 but only a very small area at 24,000:1. My current GPSr (a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx) has a removable micro-SD card which can hold an arbitrary amount of map data, limited only by size of the card I put in it^*. Similar upgradeable memory capacity is available with Magellan units. So, given that we now have no significant memory limitations... where are the high resolution maps!?

First, some background on the never-ending conflict between Magellan and Garmin. Bless their capitalistic asses, the two main players in the arena have fundamentally incompatible systems for storing their map data (Garmin uses vector data while Magellan uses raster data). Of course, neither has been willing to make any effort to work with the other to allow for universal map datasets. So once you buy in to either the Magellan or Garmin line of hardware, you are stuck with their map software as well. When I first got into this, Garmin had the better hardware and their 100,000:1 map data was cheaper, so that's the route I took. However, because Magellan uses rasterized graphics for its map data, generating new map data from new map imagery is relatively straightforward for them. Garmin, on the other hand, has to spend time vectorizing complicated map data which can be a very labor-intensive process.

Enter National Geographic TOPO!, a weirdly-named product available from... National Geographic. It is basically all of the USGS topographic maps in five levels of resolution all the way down to 24,000:1 for the entire country. The map data is available on a state-by-state basis, and is obscenely expensive (MSRP of about $100 for a state, though you can find it for about $75 of you look around). Because it is raster data, Magellan was quick to make a partnership with them and now the 24,000:1 data are finally available for Magellan units. Finally!

Of course, this doesn't help me... since I'm heavily invested in Garmin at this point. However, the existence of vastly superior map data over at Magellan is certainly putting the screws to the Garmin folks to offer something competitive, and I'm sure it won't be long now before we see the same data available in vectorized, scalable goodness. Garmin has already released a 24,000:1 product that just covers the national parks, though they split it up into three separate volumes (west, midwest, and east) which is aggravating. Also, some private ventures are doing some of the work for them. AboveTheTimber.com has released the complete Colorado 24,000:1 dataset for Garmin for the price of $80. I see light at the end of the tunnel.

^*Actually, with the 60CSx, the operating system places constraints on the number of map units that can be uploaded (I think it's 500), which actually limits the usable card space to about 600 MB (when using 100,000:1 map data, this accounts for roughly half of the continental United States). Thus, half of my 1 GB card is blank and that really annoys me. I'm hoping for an OS update sometime soon that will correct this arbitrary limitation.

Other than Bunnie and Mikki, both of whom I've already contacted. Jude, are you still in San Diego? Anyway I'm going to be in these places later this month. Fire me an email if you want to get together.