Memes that made me laugh 307

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

Back to early classical music for a change.  Here's a selection of pieces for baroque (9-string) guitar by Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739).  The guitarist is Evangelina Mascardi, and the harpist and percussionist is Lincoln Almada (scroll to the bottom half of the page for an English translation).  The pieces are:

0:00 Grabe
2:16 Allegro
4:21 Zarambeques
6:36 Marizapalos
10:06 Fandango
14:49 Canario

Fire, elegance and grace.  Magnifico!

Peter

Preparing to die

 

Ben Sasse, former US Senator and former President of the University of Florida, announced last December that he'd been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

In a wide-ranging discussion with Ross Douthat, Mr. Sasse discusses his current state of health (parlous), and how he's preparing for his approaching death.  I found it a very moving discussion, particularly his courage and openness in speaking out about the end of his life and how he's trying to fill every remaining minute of it with important things.

The New York Times published an opinion column about this interview titled "How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying".  At present, it's not behind a paywall.  If you prefer to read rather than watch or listen, I highly recommend clicking over there to read it.  It's long, but well worth your time.  If you'd rather not read it, here's his hour-long-plus interview with Mr. Douthat.

I can only admire Mr. Sasse's faith, and his willingness to be so open about a subject often regarded as taboo among many people today.  I hope and pray that his example will inspire many to think about their own futures, and how "in the midst of life we are in death", to quote the ancient funeral ceremony.

May God be merciful to Mr. Sasse, and welcome him home to eternity when the time comes.

Peter

I see prison inmates are as determined as ever to "beat the system" - even if it kills them

 

I wasn't surprised to read this article the other day.

When guards at the Cook County Correctional Facility found 57-year-old inmate Thomas Diskin dead, slumped around his cell’s toilet in January 2023, investigators were left scratching their heads: There was no evidence of foul play or a fall that could’ve killed the prisoner.

The only thing out of the norm? Tiny strips of singed paper littered around his cell. 

“I said, ‘We need to test this and find out what’s going on with it,’” Cook County Sheriff’s Office chief of staff Brad Curry recalled about that moment, referring to the paper shreds. 

Eventually, a Pennsylvania lab would confirm that the strips were soaked in a synthetic cannabinoid called Pinaca, which proved lethal when Diskin smoked the paper.

Before authorities could stop it, other inmates were dropping dead under eerily similar circumstances. 

. . .

Guards ... began inspecting every single piece of mail that came into the lockup, looking for stains and discoloration that could indicate synthetic drugs on it, and ramped up random cell searches and surveillance.

But the strips of drug-soaked paper were sometimes so tiny, guards wouldn’t find them — and not even drug-trained police K-9s were able to sniff out the new synthetic cannabinoid they contained, Curry explained. 

. . .

When the mailroom got too hot with scrutiny, smugglers began dousing legal documents in drugs to make it look like they came straight from the courthouse.

They even put it on pages of thick books that came to the prison packaged as if they’d been sent straight from Amazon or a local bookstore. 

Just one 8×11 piece of paper full of the drugs could run up to $10,000 — a price tag apparently high enough to turn the heads of several money-hungry staffers — who ended up in cuffs for smuggling it to inmates, according to Curry.

There's more at the link.

Drug dealers have a huge financial incentive to get drugs into prisons, because security precautions make it much harder to get them to their customers.  Prices are thus often five to ten times more than "on the street", and sometimes - such as during a prolonged security lockdown - a lot more than that.

When I worked as a prison chaplain, one of our biggest headaches was the misuse of religious services materials by inmates and dealers trying to smuggle drugs inside through the chapel.  Bibles with certain pages soaked in drug solutions, then dried out;  "incense" that was nothing but (often very highly concentrated) drug powder;  bottles of liquid drug concentrate concealed inside statues or within niches carved out of crosses before they were assembled;  the list was endless, and was always expanding.  Many of us said that if the inmates we supervised would put one-tenth as much effort into hard, honest work as they did into illegal activities, they'd all be millionaires.  We had to institute a policy that religious goods could only be sent direct from the supplier (whom we had to approve beforehand) to the prison, without going through any other person, even the inmate's family.  That was the only way we could keep the problem within manageable proportions.

Even that wasn't foolproof, because some suppliers are not what they appear to be at first glance.  One of my favorite examples was the group of Rastafarian inmates who persuaded a relatively new prison staffer that they wanted to order some "holy oil of anointing" for their religious ceremonies.  She authorized the purchase, and a few days later happened to innocently mention it to a senior corrections officer.  He beetled his brows at her and issued special instructions to the Receiving Department.  When the "holy oil" arrived, it was sequestered until it could be tested.  Needless to say, it was high-test cannabis oil - doubtless of deep religious significance to Rastafarians, but not exactly in line with prison security regulations.  Police at the place of origin were tipped off, and they proceeded to take a deep and abiding interest in the supplier (to his subsequent profound unhappiness).

So, this most recent episode, as reported above, doesn't surprise me at all.  "Criminals gonna criminal", as I've heard more than one corrections officer put it;  and behind bars, they have all the time in the world to figure out new ways to "stick it to the man" and get around, over, under or through security precautions and procedures.  If they succeed, for a time their reputation in the prison will soar.  If they fail, the other inmates will have a good laugh at their expense - then everyone will try even harder to get away with it next time.

Prison work is anything but boring.  (Those who've read my memoir of prison ministry will recall Sam the Sex God, who had no need of illicit drugs to earn an automatic entry into the "anything but boring" category!)

Peter

So much for "unbreakable" codes...

 

Elon Musk dropped a bomb on the cryptocurrency market when he highlighted the impact of Google's recent announcement about the impact of quantum computing.

Elon Musk has added his voice to fears sparked by Google dramatically bringing forward its quantum computing timeline, putting almost $500 billion worth of bitcoin at risk.

"On the plus side, if you forgot the password to your wallet, it will be accessible in the future," Musk posted to X alongside a “conversation” with Musk’s Grok chatbot that said post-quantum migration for cryptocurrencies “is urgent now.”

Musk was responding to venture capitalist Max Reiff who summarized Google’s research as, “basically saying: ‘We’ve cut the quantum resources needed to break bitcoin’s encryption by 20x. We can now break it. We can prove it. We’re just not going to tell you how. We’ve slowed down research to give crypto a chance. You have until 2029 to figure out a solution. Good luck.’”

. . .

Earlier this week, Google’s Quantum AI team warned in a paper that the number of qubits required to break the cryptography protecting bitcoin and ethereum wallets is potentially as much as 20-fold lower than previous estimates.

“We’re setting a timeline for post-quantum cryptography migration to 2029,” Google’s vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins wrote in a blog post. "Quantum computers will pose a significant threat to current cryptographic standards, and specifically to encryption and digital signatures."

Venture capitalist Nic Carter, who has been sounding the alarm on quantum computing’s threat to crypto since last year, compared the quantum threat to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S. government program that led to the development of nuclear weapons.

There's more at the link.

This is serious enough when it comes to cryptocurrency - any cryptocurrency.  There are no pieces of paper changing hands in cryptocurrency transactions.  It's all done electronically, with one's cryptocurrency holdings being held in an electronic "wallet" with a passcode to access them.  Until now, that passcode has been considered very secure in the face of current decoding/decryption technology.  However, quantum computers can tackle the decryption problem many orders of magnitude faster than present computers.  Once they're on the market, much that is cryptologically "secure" today will no longer be so.

Now, apply that to any other codes, cyphers, etc.  Literally any secret message at all will be subject to cryptological analysis and attack.  Top secret military signals, inter-bank communications about economic activity, diplomatic messages - any and all of them that use current encryption technology will be vulnerable.  Many believe that major actors in the field are already storing every encrypted message they can intercept, even if they can't read them, because when they can read them (with the aid of quantum computers) in a few years' time, they'll be a gold mine of historical information that can be used to analyze current events and predict future decisions.  Even so-called "one-time pad" or OTP encryption - seen until now as the only truly unbreakable code, provided that all requirements for their creation and use are strictly observed - won't be as secure if quantum computers can identify any failure to meet one or more requirements, and use that weakness to break into the code.  (However, quantum key distribution and other new technologies may step up to make the OTP even more secure.)

If Google's prediction is correct, a great deal that is now secret won't be for much longer.  That might be catastrophic in many ways.  On the other hand, James Howells might be happy at last!  He's the man who threw away a computer hard drive containing the key to a cryptocurrency wallet containing (he claims) about US $700 million in Bitcoin.  If he can recall the address of the wallet, the new quantum decryption technology might let him reclaim its contents . . . but only if someone else doesn't remember his story and get there ahead of him, locating the wallet, decrypting its key, and making off with the Bitcoin first!

Peter