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Sabta's shimmering greatness was particularly awful today; a pinkish glare that was harmless to the Ksreskézai themselves—but could easily burn and maim a slokdtaba if she stood in it for too long. Closer to night the sky would be a more bearable blue, but the pink tinge of high noon was truly pain embodied. After metal toxicity and childbirth, melanoma was, by far, the most common cause of death for the frail little servants. […]

It's only a matter of time before any existing cryptographic method is cracked.

On the plus side, this seems to take longer than it does to invent good, new ones.

Why not keep the SSH or Tor protocol on a rolling update schedule, like web browsers? Encryption methods should expire just like passwords.

Counterintelligence seems like a good way to create a reliable job market for cryptography experts.

Obviously this is what secret agencies already do, but the commercial market could churn out new standards frequently with enough heads involved, flawed though they might end up being.

Analogy to a one-time pad, maybe?

Because of horizontal gene transfer, it's wrong to talk about bacteria in the same way we regard other kingdoms of life. I propose that all bacterial species that participate in HGT be rebranded as 'eigenspecies' or 'eigengenomes'—as if their genetic material were a vector being applied to a matrix (the environment) to yield a constant result (for humourous reasons, the eigenvalue should be 2, to indicate binary fission.) Of course, no genome is completely static, so they'd be near-eigengenomes. Very rapidly changing species are of course not steady-state at all; they are just some vector getting screwed up by the matrix.

This perhaps can be used to talk about any species, since a stable environment generally means a stable survival rate and negative evolutionary pressure, but I think the transitory nature of the designation is particularly suitable to our little transitory friends.

"What in the world is this?" […]

[Note: This is a joke. Or, at least, it was going to be when I started writing it.]

Every year, tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of newly-minted undergraduates around the globe join a student activist organisation. Such organisations span the political spectrum and all issues imaginable, but are predominantly progressive in their principles and address either social issues on a national or international level, or focus on some disease. The majority of such groups emphasize awareness campaigns, although most also collect donations that in some way benefit their cause.

For several reasons, this is a terrible idea. […]

Roxanne,
You don't have to turn on the red light;
Those days are over,
The tubes are now balanced and all is right.
[…]

Measuring number of roots as an index of a language's maturity... what could possibly go wrong?  […]

This has been stewing around in my head for a little while now. Seems like the sort of thing I intended to write here. Yes, the hour is odd. No, I'm not having trouble sleeping. You are.

Retrospective admission: this article is nonsense. At the time I'd only seen newbie languages and didn't realise how large the conlang community was. Ignore this. […]

By far the most remarkable thing is how much of these changes stop existing when Explorer isn't running. Technically I like the ribbon in Explorer because I'm a fan of the ribbon UI for cheesy HCI activism reasons, but I don't think I'd ever actually resort to it since right-clicking is more immediate.

The technical differences are as follows. […]

I was going to write some awful poetry here, but I'll just be blunt: the velocity and volume of material behind machine learning research leaves me on my knees. Every generation has said that general AI is only a few years away—but not every generation has had classification accuracy comparable to a well-trained human expert. Obviously that's not the last step in assembling your very own heuristically-programmed algorithmic computer, or even a plausible tactical drone, but it's a very big deal. […]