this is just to say

i have drunk the protein shake that was in the fridge and which you were probably saving for breakfast it was so gross what
was i thinking

What Does the Internet of Things Mean for Security?

We are standing at the edge of a very steep hill full of sharp rocks, and internet-connected hardware manufacturers are trying to push us over.

Imagine you woke up one day to find out that overnight you lost access to every account you use online -- Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, you name it. Worse, because all your password resets ran through your Gmail account, there's no easy way to get these accounts back. Now imagine that all of this happened because you bought the wrong fridge.

This sounds like a thought experiment, but it isn't. For those few who're unlucky enough to own the vulnerable model of 'smart' fridge, this could actually happen. This is reality. It's made by Samsung and costs about $3600. If an attacker can get within radio distance of the fridge, they could take over the fridge owner's Google account without breaking a sweat.

Once we've got that (imagining ourselves now in the attacker's shoes, taking advantage of some poor sap who dropped close to four grand on an absurd fridge), we can pull up their other accounts, hit that big fat "password reset" button, and get a link delivered to your new mailbox inviting you to set the account's password to whatever you like. Note that the strength of the original passwords has no bearing on whether this attack can work.

Diving Deeper Into Deep Dream: Different Distortions

The moment you get Google Research's Deep Dream project set up, you can make it do incredible things. If you want to generate trippy zooms with lots of dogs and eyes, the code Google provides works more or less out-of-the-box.

For reference, here is a gist for a .py file containing all the code from the notebook. This is meant to be run through an interactive interpreter, e.g. by providing the -i flag at runtime or, in iPython, starting a new notebook and then executing e.g. "run demo.py".

And, here is a gist for a similar but extended piece of code which takes an input file on the command line and performs the iterative process described at the very end of the researchers' original iPython notebook. Both these files are almost entirely composed of code from that notebook; they're just provided as references, so we can have some well-established starting points from which to branch out.

Setting Up Deep Dream, Google Research's Hallucinatory Work of Genius

Google Research wrote recently about a technique they call "Inceptionism", which needs to be seen to be believed. Click through and check out their pictures. A full gallery of official images can be found here. The techniques used to generate these sorts of images were described in broad strokes in this blog post, but the level of detail stopped just short of what someone wanting to replicate their results might have wanted.

That is, until they published their source code.

In this repo (which was created just this morning, as of this post's writing) is an IPython notebook which contains everything necessary to duplicate the results you see in their blog post. That's so cool that it's honestly a little hard to believe. The dependencies are detailed in the repo. There are surprisingly few of them, and they're all surprisingly easy to get set up. Let me walk you through what I had to do on my Debian Stretch system to get everything up and running.

Evaluating the Alternating Harmonic Series

Here's a fun little note I just found while organizing my desk. I discovered this proof during a class on infinite series last summer. The professor mentioned the limit of the alternating harmonic series, then commented offhand that "this limit is true, but we cannot prove it yet." Never one to shy from a challenge, I decided to see whether he was right, and had roughly this proof scrawled on a piece of paper by the end of class. He suggested that I try to publish it in an undergrad journal, but that didn't pan out for various reasons. Nevertheless, it's a fun proof, and I wasn't able to find it anywhere online, so I thought I'd share it here.

The alternating harmonic series is defined as

which, of course, is just the harmonic series with the sign of every other term flipped.

It is well known that the harmonic series diverges. Slightly less well known is that the alternating harmonic series converges to a very clean limit -- strangely enough, it turns out to be ln 2. This fact, if it comes up, is usually proved just as a trivial consequence of the Euler-Mascheroni constant's most common identity. Not only is that proof beyond the reach of many undergrads, it's also so trivial as to border on inane. It's like using a sledgehammer to pound in a nail: of course it works, but is it really the best way? Someone pass me a hammer.

Consider the following series:

Finding Files with Multiple Substrings

I'd like to share with you a challenge I ran into last night, a problem that's really difficult unless you take to the command line.

Some background: I play Go. The GoGoD game database, which I recently bought and downloaded, has somewhere on the order of 80,000 Go game records in it. These games are all in .sgf format, which is a simple plaintext format. Records of games from professionals of many different ranks are included. The rating scale for professionals starts at 1 dan (or "shodan") and goes up to 9 dan, the highest rating a player can achieve. Games between professionals are always interesting, but games between 9dan professionals are, in particular, packed with subtlety and value for the ambitious student of Go.

Any game from this database is worth studying, but with over eighty thousand games to choose from, it helps to be able to pick highlights, and what better way than by focusing on games between 9dans?

If we decide to take this route, we're immediately faced with a second question: sure, we can just open games at random until we find one between 9dans, but this is boring and slow. Are we doomed to tedium, or is there some way we could search this database of more than eighty thousand games, pick out only the games between 9dans, and copy these over to a special "elite database"?

To the average user, this might sound impossible. On the command line, it's almost trivial.

In Defense of Honors Programs (or, Read a Fucking Book)

In planning the follow-up to a survival skills event for incoming Honors freshmen, the question came up of how best to articulate to new students the value of WWU's honors program. Especially for STEM students, the fact is that the liberal-arts-focused Honors courseload can be expected to overlap very little (if at all) with their major's courses. That's a non-negligible number of extra credits, and there's nothing scarier than a delay in graduation, and so lots of people in the program question, at one point or another, whether the program is worth seeing through to the end. It's our job to try and make the case that it is.

Of course, regardless of obligation, it'd be disingenuous of us to argue this point if we did not ourselves wholly believe it. For my part, I am lucky in this regard, because in spite of (because of?) being a Math/CS double major, I'm convinced that the honors classes I've taken have on average been far more valuable than anything I've taken in either of my majors. Ditto for the classes I'm planning on taking. That's not because I don't like my majors -- far from it, I'm crazy about them. But computer science is close being treated as a trade skill, and math's "beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture" (Russell) nourishes only certain parts of the mind. Both majors are fantastic for what they are, but what they are is not a complete education. Similar things could be said for practically any other major: They leave gaps, and honors fills those gaps.

My first, informal attempt at articulating to my co-planners this argument for why to stick with honors went something along these lines:

Why stay with honors? Because we offer things you can't get anywhere else. We have classes you can take as a freshman that're on par with the upper-division classes in specialized majors. You can just be like, "I want to learn about Russian literature this quarter" or "I want to learn about film this quarter" and nobody's going to be like, what the fuck, you're a chem major. These kinds of classes are just there, and anyone in the program can take them. If you don't want to be an English major but you want to study great books, we're your best shot. If you want to be in rooms full of clever people talking about Nabokov or Robbe-Grillet or Bely or Dante or for that matter anyone else worth reading, we've got you covered. We've got some of the best professors in the university teaching our classes. Great classes, taught by great professors -- what more do you fucking want?