eafarris.com

The personal site of eric a. Farris

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Friday Morning Music: Mogwai, "Helicon 1." 1997.

I love Mogwai, ever since Dave Helmers turned me on to them many years ago. They're considered "post-rock," but honestly I have no idea what that means. I know I like their ethereal guitars and distortion, mostly instrumental songs, and the soft-loud-soft construction of most of their work.

"Helicon 1" is interesting musically, because it has an 8 feel. Typically, if a song has 8 beats, you break it down in four, and usually smack something on the second and fourth beats to give a rock feel. But this song can't be broken down in four; it's definitely in 8, and is broken up 3/3/2. I find that very pleasing; at once familiar and strange.

It's been a while since I've done one of these, but this is a cathartic end to my week. Events have conspired to fill me with equal parts of rage and sadness, and "Helicon 1" is a pretty good outlet for both.

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Eighty-seven percent of Android devices are insecure

Make sure you get those updates.

University of Cambridge study finds 87% of Android devices are insecure

The problem with Android security is that updates are four layers away.

Google fixes the issue and gives it to the phone manufacturers

The manufacturers implement it on their reference devices and send it to the carriers.

The carriers implement it and give it out to users

The users install it.

This multilayer approach takes a very long time, and some manufacturers don't go back and support their older devices, and some carriers don't bother with devices they no longer sell. And a lot of users don't bother with system updates.

iOS has its own, different problem. While the process is much more streamlined (directly from Apple to users), Apple takes its good time pushing out their updates. Almost all of the vulnerabilities discovered in iOS are exploitable only to jailbreak users or users of enterprise profiles, both of which are very small numbers of iOS users. But when a vulnerability is found that affects iOS proper, Apple's graph would go to 100% vulnerable to almost zero when Apple releases a security update.

Further complicating things are the built-in apps for each platform. One of the many things Google gets right with Android is that most apps are unbundled from the OS, allowing them to push updates to applications like Mail or the browser (why isn't it Chrome yet?) independently from the OS, while Apple continues to clutter up iOS with apps that cannot be removed or updated separately. This means that Google can release a patch for a vulnerability in an app just by putting an update on the Play Store, whereas Apple must update the entire OS if an app has an issue.

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Unanswerable

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

— Richard Feynman

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The simple algorithms that make up the "AI" of the ghosts in Pac-Man. Fascinating.

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Andy Ihnatko on the sad, sad case of Ahmed Mohammed. This hits entirely too close to the mark for me. I was one of those kids. And my son, already labeled a troublemaker is, too.

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From r/denverbroncos

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Friday Morning Music -- Phases, "Cooler." Phases (formerly JJAMZ) matches modern lyric and songwriting sensibilities with a faithful 80s sound that is right on target.

If you're thinking that that sounds like something that would be very very good, you're right. It's pretty fantastic.

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Dr. Drang is able to shed light on what has been bothering me about this election pre-season. It's not that Donald Trump is a liar, it's that he's a bullshitter, and that subtle but important distinction makes all the difference.

Dr. Drang quotes from Harry Frankfurt:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.

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Friday Morning Music: "Mountain Greenery," by Rodgers and Hart, as performed by Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke show, 1962.

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Your weirdness is your armor

"Wear what people might think is weird of you out in front. Use it as your armor. 'cause if they know it, and you control the message, no one can hurt you."

— Justin Robert Young, "Swag Board," The JuRY Show

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We're a group. We're a team. From the President and Leo on through, we're a team. We win together, we lose together. We celebrate and we mourn together. And defeats are softened and victories sweetened because we did them together. And if you don't like this team, then there's the door.

It's great to be in the know. It's great to have the scoop, to have the skinny. To be able to go to a reporter and say "I know something you don't know." And so the press becomes your constituents, and you sell out the team. So, an item will appear in the paper tomorrow, and it will be embarrassing to me, and embarrassing to the President.

I'm not going to have a witch hunt; I'm not going to huff and puff; I'm not going to take anyone's head off. I'm simply going to say this:

You're my guys.

And I'm yours.

And there's nothing I wouldn't do for you.

-- Toby Ziegler, leader of men.

From "The West Wing," S03E05, "War Crimes."

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The second (I think) full trailer for The Martian, which is the movie I'm most looking forward to this year. Yes, there is another, but this one is first on my list.

Mark Watney is a wonderful fictional character (and Matt Damon is perfect casting). Here we see some of his incredible sarcasm and optimism. We also see in this trailer a bit more of the conversation that is going on off-Mars about him, and the planning of a rescue mission, or not.

Can't. Wait.

(BTW, you still have plenty of time to read the novel before the movie opens. Go, and do. It's one of my favorite books.)

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Friday Morning Music: "Take the Long Way Home," Lazlo Bane, 2007.

This is a pretty great cover of my favorite Supertramp song.

Does it feel that your life's become a catastrophe? Oh, It has to be, for you to grow, boy. When you look through the years and see what you could have been Oh, what you might have been If you'd had more time…

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Friday Morning Music: "The National Anthem," by Radiohead, from Kid A, 2000.

This is the Saturday Night Live performance from October 2000. This is what got me hooked on Radiohead, this performance of this song right here. I had heard "Creep" and other songs from them before, but nothing took my brain out, massaged it, and then put it back quite like this performance did.

And I think Thom experiences music (and perhaps life) differently than the rest of us, using senses we just don't have.

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Friday Morning Music: "The Way You Make Me Feel," Michael Jackson. From the album Bad, 1987.

The King of Pop at the height of his power.