COLLECTING THE OINKWORTHY

Not so current developments in typography

09 April 2020
Given the feeling of time suspended brought on by COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders (and suspension of normal life in general

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Make America Porcine Again

02 April 2019
The title links to an evergreen post via the University of Michigan Map Library blog. I keep returning to it, eight years after my first glimpse…

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Beauty of the Sea

20 Feb 2011
This is a spectacular Roman mosaic, now on exhibit for those within hailing distance of Manhattan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I love mosaic art, modern and ancient. The image above is one small part of a larger collection found in Lod, Israel in 1996. It was created in 300 A.D.

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Chrome Web Lab: Orchestra Recording

• Just a little bit more Bitcoin trouble
  Originally published on June 17, 2014 There has been so much tumult in bitcoin and cryptocurrency over the past few days! Interest and concern extends beyond online communities. Motives vary.
• Growth of the early Internet, node by node
  Network diagrams are a popular way of visualizing social and corporate relationships. Network theory has been used to model telecommunications performance and especially, the Internet. Communications networks increase in value as the number of connections increases. […]
• Not so current developments in typography
  I wrote this post about the Indian rupee some years ago but never published it. Given the feeling of time suspended brought on by COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders (and suspension of normal life in general), I […]
• SHODAN related infosec assortment
  I never attended DEFCON, though it remains a dream I hope to realize one day, soon. It may soon become too logistically awkward due to increasing numbers of attendees. Shodan is a remarkable search engine. […]
• Monetize Your Followers
  As a statistician and mathematical modeling practitioner, I’m not a stranger to the concept of quantifying the value of intangibles.  In the ethical framework in which I studied and worked, such quantification might be applied […]
• Activism for profit
  Activist hedge funds have been playing an increasingly central role in corporate governance. Stock markets do not capture the long term costs of short-term pillaging. As a result, these activist investors can pursue transactions that […]
• Cutting corners on telecom infrastructure with Huawei
  In January 2013, I wrote a blog post about Huawei’s twisty, winding path to prominence. There were plenty of oddities, e.g. Huawei was supplier to the Taliban and nearly acquired by GOP presidential Mitt Romney… […]
• Google graphs and graphs for code search
  A graphing calculator In 2012, Google discontinued its highly-regarded code search. It was freely available for open source projects residing on Google Code project hosting. This is the only description of the pre-2012 Google Code Search I […]
• My father In memorium
  Veteran’s Day For my father, Captain Russell H. Kesselman, U.S. Air Force, 1927 – 2009. The loss and sorrow does not diminish. I think of my father every single day. I miss him so much. I wish […]
• The problem with randomness
  How to generate random numbers from spam I found SecurityDump’s WPRandom the other day: Generating random numbers is pretty complicated if you need them for cryptographic algorithms. This software generates them based on spam comments…
• The EPA is not the Federal Reserve of oil markets
  Energy market pricing behavior seems contrary to the relationship between supply and demand. The oddly behaving RIN market is an intermediate factor that influences gasoline prices for automobiles. RIN (Renewable Identification Numbers) should be decreasing. […]
• Economic Models for Turbulent Times Part 2
  Originally posted on November 20, 2011 at 4:28 AM  A new research study has already received unusual attention. The Network of Global Corporate Control [PDF] discovers a relatively small group of multinational companies with disproportionate influence over the […]
• Economic Models for Turbulent Times Part I
  Originally Published on December 5, 2010 AT 7:58 AM Crust is an algorithm for reconstructing surfaces of any topology. In other words, it is a computational method for digitally rendering any 2-D shape, using data in […]
• Things fall apart
  Read Quote of Ellie Kesselman’s answer to Neo-Jeffersonianism: Is Occupy the right structural model for neo-Jeffersonianism at the “movement” level? on Quora     Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  […]
• Recovery is the same all over
  The Youth for Christ Center in Myanmar provides food, shelter, safety, rest, Bible study and singing, free of charge, for 40 days to a maximum of three months. Via Reuters, Photos of the Week: Faith healing for […]
• Linking your Google account and YouTube account
  I deleted my Google Account- what happened to my YouTube Account? – YouTube Help: Usually, when you delete a Google Account, all related Google Services are deleted at the same time. There was a long-standing […]
• YouTube Video Scavenger Hunt
  YouTube – Broadcast Yourself included a hyper-linked line of text at the bottom of my search results today. It read something along the lines of “Discover video treasures on YouTube”. What could be described in such glowing […]
• Google Public DNS
  Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service. You can use it as an alternative to your current DNS provider. How can I take it out for a test run? To […]
• The Anti-Matter of Network Security
  Is virtual routing the “anti-matter” of network security? This post from the Rational Security blog* presented a convincing case as to why that might be so. It was dated December 2008. I don’t know if virtual routing […]