Why is this guy hard to replace? There are tons of college stoners who have the skills to blow you any glass you want. Visit your local head shop if you doubt this. Why not get one of those?
It's not just general glassblowing skill; it's the intersection of that skill with knowledge of the sets of uses to which it will be put, and the techniques specific to creating forms that are not just bongs and statues.
Do they work in borosilicate or in softer glasses? Can their products take a vacuum? Multiple atmospheres? Cryogenic liquids? Have they done glass/tungsten connections? Threads? Can they silver glass? What experience do they have with a glassblowing lathe? Milling using diamond tooling? CNC waterjet cutter?
That said, they would clearly have to do a lot of learning and training for the more specific scientific applications, and since many artists get thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars per piece, I'm sure you'd have a hard time luring them away. On top of that, they probably couldn't be stoned all day and would go from making art to making whatever functional objects are needed.
Well, that shows I know more about scientific glass than recreational and medical.
Still, lightlyused referred to "several glass blowers in that community" who lightlyused personally knew. My comment was in response to that. I seriously doubt that those are the ones who make high end pieces.
Bong making is not hard. It's one of the things that chemistry undergrads often do if they take a glass blowing class and the staff lets them get away with it. (Sometimes the lab teacher will even anneal your 'project'.)
I can be good enough at carpentry to make bookshelves for me and my friends. That doesn't mean I can build a good staircase.
Similarly, it would be hard to lure me away to, say, a job developing cloud computing infrastructure.
He's saying that if you looked at the whole history of the US and divided that into 10 equal parts, then there would be a 10% chance of any random observation falling into the last part. Hence, all else equal, we have a 10% chance that we are looking at the US in the last 10% of it's history.
This would imply that there is also a 10% chance we are currently looking at the first 10% of the country's existence, which means you have confidently calculated the odds of the USA lasting at least 2350 years at 10% based on absolutely nothing. These probabilities are nonsense.
As a mathematician (though not a cryptographer), I have a great deal of difficulty trusting cryptographic protocols which have a mathematical basis. Whether they are based on factoring, elliptic curves, or any other mathematical concept, they always "smelled" sketchy to me for the very simple reason that they are easy to formulate in terms of mathematical ideas, hence naturally lend themselves to the thought process of an algebraist or a number theorist. In short, these problems look like precisely the sort of questions a mathematical genius would find tractable. Without any solid proof that they are actually computationally hard to break, it seems like they are inherently dangerous to rely upon because they look like fair game to the next Ramanujan.
I'll also go out on a limb here and also say that I think the technology community has a bias towards thinking something like "math == hard" is true, so gives added weight towards using these same protocols. I know many people here have deep knowledge of both cryptography and software development, so I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts on these issues. Can anyone speak about options to math-based public key algorithms, or ways to inject some skepticism into the tech community about these algorithms, so perhaps alternatives can start being implemented? A public key algorithm which doesn't lend itself easily to algebraic analysis would feel much safer to me.
Pretty much all of crypto is based on and analyzed by math (at the very least computing and complexity theory), so I'm not clear at all what you're saying here.
People prefer algorithms with a clear mathematical basis because they're easier to analyze, so the flaws surface easier and it's clearer what breakthroughs would break them.
Cryptographers have been looking for algorithms that are NP-hard for example, because having a "breakthrough" in them having to require P=NP is a large hurdle. But it's not the end of the story, because it turns out that a problem being NP-hard doesn't mean it isn't easy to crack (worst case vs actual case).
Your comment reads a bit as saying "we shouldn't use maths to compute things". But maths is what computers do...
I was mainly curious if any asymmetric algorithms exist which are not easily analyzed by algebraists, et al. According to the comment by tveita, this does not appear likely, and I am sorry to hear it. I don't discount what you say about mathematical algorithms being easier to analyze, so flaws are shallower. However, I have seen smart people do quite amazing things with mathematics in my life. People who spend years studying algebra or number theory learn so many patterns that the good ones can pull unbelievably clever arguments seemingly out of pure intuition. That is somewhat disconcerting to me because something like RSA or ECC is precisely the sort of problem those people can apply that intuition and pattern recognition towards. I obviously don't know of an asymmetric algorithm which is analogous, but something like AES is a nightmare to analyze algebraicly (it really does have that "jumble of shit" look to it when written out as an operator). That seems to me to offer some small resistance to the math genius with the spooky intuition. My main point was how dangerous a smart person can be with a problem that his/her brain is geared for, so I was curious if any algorithms existed which are not easy for a mathematician to attack.
This is understood. RSA depends on prime factoring. (EC)DH depends on discrete logarithms. These problems have been studied by the kind of people you mention, from all over the world, an in some cases massive speedups and breakthroughs have been made. But even after all those years, the problems are still "hard enough". That's what gives them confidence.
I'm not even sure what you would imagine the alternative would be. An algorithm that isn't amendable to mathematical analysis?
Even for symmetrical ciphers, which look far less like pure math, analysis proceeds very much along mathematical lines (differential/linear cryptanalysis), or in some cases, via algebra as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_attack
I can't really say what I imagine the alternative to be (if I could, I'd write it up), but I do know that if it had an inherent complexity in it's mathematical structure, I would image it to be more resistant to attack by a good mathematician than otherwise. At present we cannot prove that any of these algorithms is actually NP complete and the best device in existence to prove the conventional wisdom wrong sits between two ears. I think any algorithm designed to make the human brain less effective at analyzing it necessarily adds security, although I wholeheartedly cede the point that it also makes the flaws in said algorithm harder to find, so there is obviously a trade-off inherent to this approach. I also agree that any analysis will ultimately take a mathematical flavor (it is an algorithm of course, math is essentially the only trick humans have come up with here), but that isn't to say we can't craft one which makes that analysis fiendishly difficult. Thanks for the XSL link, I'm not a cryptographer, so wasn't aware of that.
I think the issue is that the additional properties required for asymmetric key cryptography (as opposed to symmetric) are hard to gain without introducing some structure.
What do mean by this? I don't think complexity classes give any provable security to asymmetric cryptography. It cannot be proven that the difficulty of breaking any of the currently used (or known?) asymmetric key cryptography is not in P (It can't even be proven to be NP-complete).
Asymmetric crypto clearly is in NPcomplete. What one can not prove yet is that some crypto system is in NPcomplete \ P (since this would imply P != NP).
To be in NP-complete a problem must both be in NP and every problem in NP must have a polynomial time reduction to it.
This means that NP-complete is fully contained in NP and in fact smaller if P!=NP.
For example P is contained in NP and if P!=NP then no problems in P are in NP-complete.
In practice, relying on a clearly defined mathematical problem that is thought to be hard to solve has worked out a lot better than the common alternative of throwing a bunch of random shit together and hoping the result is too complex for anyone to understand.
For asymmetric cryptography there is no alternative not based on math. Even snake oil cryptography mostly deals in symmetric crypto like "unbreakable" ciphers and hashes, because you can't make a working asymmetric encryption scheme by mashing together whatever operations your schizophrenia tells you to.
The Discordians promulgated a code that might be a bit more mathematically resistant. It involves this series of steps:
CONVERSION:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
STEP 1. Write out the message (HAIL ERIS) and put all the vowels at the end (HLRSAIEI)
STEP 2. Reverse order (IEIASRLH)
STEP 3. Convert to numbers (9-5-9-1-19-18-12-8)
STEP 4. Put into numerical order (1-5-8-9-9-12-18-19)
STEP 5. Convert back to letters (AEHIILRS)
They assert 100% unbreakability, which isn't true, but on a sufficiently long message one's anagram checker might give out, and then there is the task of ordering the words so generated...
Mind you, decryption by the intended recipient is equally complex.
Not 100% unbreakable in general, but I think it does pretty well in the real world. There are plenty of messages that Eve simply can't decrypt with complete confidence. For example, she can't tell ATTACK WILL AT DAWN from ATTACK DAWN AT WILL. She'd have to resort to priors to guess which of those was intended.
On what should they be based, if not a sound foundation that lends itself to rigorously proveable statements (I carefully say only proveable, not proven) and the well developed intuition of a community of experts? To say that, because mathematicians understand and can think about something, they will be able to solve it, seems to be denying the existence of long- (and still-) unsolved elementary problems.
Are you happier with the state of symmetric crypto, which, despite relying on conjectures (like the existence of pseudo-random functions) tends not to rely on _algebraic_ ones?
Personally, I don't have particular worries about the hardness assumptions of asymmetric crypto, and I think of them a bit like I think of bitcoin (hear me out). Yes, it is certain that eventually someone will solve the discrete log problem for any given algebraic structure (either by rendering all crypto that relies on it broken, or (less likely) proving it fundamentally secure), but for now, we know that this is hard (since it has been open for a while), and we're also incentivizing people to make mathematical discoveries.
I'd also claim that the "crypto community" (at least the academic side of it) and the "technology community" are not the same, and (at least to me) often feel opposed. Cryptologists write papers filled to the brim with dense and precise mathematical assumptions and reductions; technologists skim the papers, ignore the assumptions, and implement half-assed, unaudited versions of the systems in question and claim them secure (pardon my cynicism).
As to what the community thinks about mathematical public key crypto, they hail it as the greatest innovation since sliced bread and the herald of modern cryptography. Prior to modernity, cryptography was very ad-hoc and depended on what the author's intuitions; modernity introduced precise definitions of what it meant for a system to be secure and raised the bar. It also relies heavily on the concept of a hardness reduction, i.e. a proof that breaking a cryptogrpahic primitive is at least as hard as solving a yet-unsolved math problem.
Specifically about algebraic problems, I have a (low confidence) intuition that they are unavoidable in public-key crypto precisely because of the need for an algebraic structure relating the public and private keys. With this in mind, I'd rather have algorithms which rely on known hard to solve problems (demonstrated hard by having years of mathematical effort poured into them with minimal result) to those which rely on problems no one has ever bothered to look at.
A final question: you are unhappy with public key crypto that relies on algebra; would you be happier if it relied on some other branch of mathematics? Analysis? Topology (okay, so that's still algebra)? Complexity theory (a secure cryptosystem that relied only on P!=NP would be a holy grail for several reasons, but I don't know of any attempts to find one)? Would you feel safe using a cryptosystem that was secure if and only if the Riemann Hypothesis were true? If the RH were false? The Collatz Conjecture?
I agree on the pretty female observation. Just about every tech recruiter that's contacted me recently looks like someone I'd want to date. My father is a doctor in the US and the drug reps he deals with are also from this mold, so I guess that says something about what really works in male-centered professions.
The average defendant in the US is poor or indigent, often lacks much of a formal education, and is usually at the mercy of whatever overworked public defender they were assigned. Go ask any lawyer you know about how much weight their demands carry or how realistic a chance they have of getting evidence that has the patina of scientific certainty thrown out. I bet you discover they have about as much hope of that as a gnat trying to stop a locomotive.
Public defenders are at least politically and professionally incentivized to win cases even if they are not provided the resources to do so. In my county, the appointed defender is private and is paid per case. He is strongly incentivized to take as many cases as possible and spend as little time as possible actually defending people. "Take the plea deal" might be the best advice, but only because the system is rigged against the defendant. You don't have to be poor or indigent, either. The middle class are also in danger and even if they win their case their lives are often ruined and they experience significant financial hardships.
I can't speak for CS, but I got a PhD in applied math at a respectable school in Virginia and about 90% of our grad students were not US citizens. To my knowledge, every one of them left on completion of their degrees and I can't remember a single one who actually expressed an interest in staying. I think people who see STEM grad students as some sort of huddled masses yearning for US residency are pretty out of touch with reality. This isn't 1960 anymore.
PhD in applied and computational mathematics (Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA) with published research in statistics, numerical analysis, and functional analysis. Strong interest in software development/engineering. Loves algorithms and programming challenges. Willing to learn anything. Happy to do statistics/data analysis as well. Comfortable with Agile/Scrum development methodology. Comfortable working remote, individually, or in a team.
I'm searching for work within the tech sector, preferably within Europe and Asia. I'm open to a wide variety of technical jobs and really want to have serious programming as part of my daily responsibilities. Get in contact if you are looking for someone with strong analytical problem solving skills and the willingness to put in whatever effort is needed to get the job done.
PhD in applied and computational mathematics (Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA) with published research in statistics, numerical analysis, and functional analysis. Strong interest in software development/engineering. Loves algorithms and programming challenges. Willing to learn anything. Happy to do statistics/data analysis as well. Comfortable with Agile/Scrum development methodology. Comfortable working remote, individually, or in a team.
I'm searching for work within the tech sector, preferably within Europe and Asia. I'm open to a wide variety of technical jobs and really want to have serious programming as part of my daily responsibilities. Get in contact if you are looking for someone with strong analytical problem solving skills and the willingness to put in whatever effort is needed to get the job done.
I agree wholeheartedly on the public drinking aspect. I lived in Virginia for 30 years and if you are walking around on the street with a beer, you're essentially asking to spend 4 hours in the "drunk tank" for public intoxication. This will be followed by offering some welfare ($) to the local legal profession to get the charge dismissed or pled down so you won't have a criminal conviction for your future employers to ask you about. There are similar laws in many other states and it definitely puts the kibosh on any potential block party you may wish to have. Since moving to Europe I find it pretty awesome to be able to enjoy a beer while I stroll and not worry about being run in so I can fund some lawyer's BMW lease.
The article tip toed around the hatred "everyone who doesn't party" (which the article admits is the VAST majority of the population) has against the tiny minority who party. Mixing hyper militarized cops with high school drinking parties isn't much of a win, so the 5% or so of the party population get kicked out of the middle class pool either financially or via criminal charges before they get into their later 20s where journalists ponder why that social group mysteriously disappeared. Mix the poverty of permanent declines in economic standard of living with increasing fines to be "tough on crime" and mandatory minimums and the risk just isn't worth it both for the people who hold the party and the drunk drivers who attend, and people with risk taking disabilities are destroyed before the late 20s that the journalist is writing about.
Another cultural curiosity is I'm old enough to have been born into sports nerd dominated culture, but the times they are a changin' and the journalist is apparently completely divorced from sports nerd culture, doesn't know anyone who brings over a couple beers to watch the game with a dozen or so guys, or tailgates. The rise of liability lawsuits and anti-drinking culture might be behind a drop in tailgating. I've heard some stadiums ban tailgating entirely! Anyway its interesting that sports nerd culture has declined so incredibly far that the author doesn't even consider mentioning it. For folks too young to have ever experienced it, a ball game on TV used to be a perfectly good excuse for multi-hour long house parties even for people who aren't interested in sports, it wasn't strictly a jock thing; I guess the canonical stereotypical example would be the superbowl party where most of the party goers don't care much about the game but its a convenient holiday between new years and spring break or memorial day (valentines day doesn't count, its for couples not house parties)
That hatred is very strong indeed. It seems to be built into a lot of people, a sort of envy of others that are "having fun" (even if they're not, like in the case of addicts/alcoholics) and a desire that they should be punished, jailed, or even killed. I'm not sure if this comes from the Puritanical background here in the US or just from people's idiocy, of which there is no shortage of, but it is disgusting, cruel, and illogical. Not to mention economically and socially crippling.
One thing we learned from the Snowden revelations is that the NSA routinely uses convoluted legal justifications to do it's dirt. I'd be very skeptical that any slowdown/stoppage has actually occurred because it's likely they are simply continuing to operate under some other statute their lawyers have twisted around.
