A little computer knowledge is a dangerous thing

A California tried to use his vanity license plate to get out of paying for parking tickets. He chose the license plate NULL in the belief that when his ticket was entered into the database, it would end up in some computer dustbin and he would not get the bill. It did not quite work out that way.

It’s the story of a security researcher known as Droogie, who presented his experience at the recent DEF CON conference in Las Vegas. Droogie decided his new vanity plate should read “NULL.”
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Droogie’s hope was that the new plate would exploit California’s DMV ticketing system in a similar manner to the classic xkcd “Bobby Tables” cartoon. With any luck, the DMV’s ticket database would see “NULL” and consign any of his tickets to the void. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened.

First, Droogie got a parking ticket, incurred for an actual parking infraction—so much for being invisible. Then, once a particular database of outstanding tickets had associated the license plate NULL with his address, it sent him every other ticket that lacked a real plate. The total came to $12,049 worth of tickets.
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Although the initial $12,000-worth of fines were removed, the private company that administers the database didn’t fix the issue and new NULL tickets are still showing up.

Lesson: Don’t try to outsmart the DMV.

New study suggests that optimists tend to be healthier and live longer

According to a large-scale longitudinal study, people who are optimistic tended to live longer than those who are not, and it even increased the chances of ‘exceptional longevity’, the term used for people who live to be 85 or more.

The team split about 70,000 women into four equally sized groups, based on their scores for optimism. They then compared lifespan for the most optimistic with the least, taking into account factors including age, sex, race, education, depression and other health conditions present at the outset.

The results show the most optimistic group of women had a lifespan almost 15% longer than the least.

Similar results were seen in men, even though optimism was measured slightly differently. When the team compared the fifth of men boasting the highest optimism scores with the least optimistic, they found the most positive men had lifespans almost 11% longer.

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The dark side of cruises

People seem to like going on cruises since it is apparently a rapidly growing business, despite some recent horror stories of norovirus outbreaks on the boats. From what I can tell from the advertisements, these things are a floating combination of hotels and amusement parks. But in the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj says that underneath all the gaiety and laughter, the business model of these companies is based on ruthless exploitation of labor, dumping of waste into the environment, and a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions, combined with careful avoidance of any responsibility for anything that might go wrong on board, including sexual assault.

Given my slightly introverted nature, I think I would not find cruises enjoyable. Being constantly surrounded by large numbers of people who are determined to have a good time 24/7 and get the maximum benefit from the limited time on board would wear me out pretty quickly. I would likely retreat to my cabin for long periods of time, which would defeat the purpose of going on a cruise.

Boris Johnson is going to prorogue parliament

In his drive to prevent the UK parliament from blocking his attempts to take the UK out of the EU even with no deal, prime minister Boris Johnson has formally asked the Queen to prorogue (i.e., suspend) parliament for five weeks from mid-September. As a constitutional monarch, she had to acquiesce to his ‘request’, disappointing those who fantasized that she might instead ask the royal footman to throw him out on his ear.
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The future of the religion clauses in the current Supreme Court

The First Amendment to the US constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The clause pertaining to religion states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” which means that there are two parts, what have come to be known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. It is the Establishment Clause that has come under stress recently as religious zealots in the US, convinced that this is a Christian country, seek to make that manifest by having prayers at government functions, putting up Ten Commandments monuments in public spaces, putting mottoes like ‘In God We Trust’ on currency and elsewhere, and placing nativity scenes at Christmas time.

The US Supreme Court’s responses to the cases have been muddled, to put it frankly. They seem to struggle to find ways to accommodate at least some religious invasion of the public sphere, even if it leads to convoluted reasoning, possibly out of a sense that outright prohibition might cause too much of a furor.
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How not to respond to a Twitter critic

If you are at all involved in the world of media, you have to develop a fairly thick skin. But many establishment journalists, long used to not having immediate pushback on what they write, still get up in arms when they are criticized, however mildly, and simply make things worse.

A prime example is Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the New York Times. This article tells the story.

It began with a story about an apparent bedbug infestation at the New York Times building. Riffing on the newspaper’s predicament, David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, poked fun at Stephens on Twitter on Monday evening. The post received nine likes and zero retweets.

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Trump administration seeks to cancel the Flores agreement

We saw how the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s claim that it was not required to provide the detained migrant children with what any normal, decent, human being would consider the basic necessities, such as soap, toothpaste, showers, edible food, clean drinking water, beds and not be kept in very cold rooms with thin blankets and no proper bedding and with lights permanently on even during the night,
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Pete Buttigieg gets a negative endorsement

One of the marvels of the Donald Trump era is to see some of those who cheered on the Bush-Cheney administration in its endless wars and its support of Israel’s repression of Palestinians (Max Boot, David Frum, Jennifer Rubin) now, because they dislike Trump for whatever reason (most likely because he hasn’t signed on to new wars) become much-sought-after commentators on Democratic party politics.

You would think that any self-respecting Democratic presidential candidate would view an endorsement from any of those people as a negative and distance themselves from it. So it was disturbing to see Washington Post columnist Rubin endorsing Pete Buttigieg. Her invoking the desire to see a ‘kinder and gentler America’ is rich coming from someone who cheered the country on in its vicious wars that polarized the country.

Einstein’s debt to philosophy and Hume

Recently it seems to have become fashionable among some scientists, mainly physicists, to harshly disparage philosophy in general and the philosophy and sociology of science in particular. This was not so in times gone by, especially during the time of ferment at the dawn of the twentieth century with the development of theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. While they were developing various successful computational techniques, people struggled to figure out what these theories meant because they seemed to defy our intuitions of how matter behaved at very small scales and when it was traveling very fast.
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