Speaking of praying for parking spaces…

Earlier today I remembered a piece of trivia from my Former Life as a Christian. I should mention, what follows is distinctly in the “random blog post about some crap nobody else will be interested in” category. You have been warned.

When I was at university, one of the well-honed routes I used to drive to get there (before the M5 was finished) included a particular set of traffic lights, going east on Gardeners Rd and turning left into Tunstall Ave:

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What made these particular lights interesting was that they had an uncanny habit of being green when I got to them. Sometimes they’d turn green just as I pulled up. Now, you might put this down to being synchronised with an earlier set of lights, or being turnoff from a fairly major road to a dinky side street that probably wouldn’t stay red for long, and the logical part of my mind knew this. But somehow the superstitious part of my mind convinced me that it was Meaningful, and that it would be a Bad Sign if I ever had to stop there.

Don’t try to find the logic in that, there isn’t any.

The strangest thing about it is that it wasn’t even in line with my Christan beliefs. We put superstition under the “witchcraft” clause of Galatians 5:20. (Where’s the line between superstition and acting in accordance with the will of an invisible entity? I dunno. That’s a different discussion.) But there’s a drive in the human mind to find meaning in pattern, and it is strong with this one.

I do remember that the lights were red one day. I vaguely recall something bad happening later that day, but I can’t remember what it was, and I only realised later, and I’m pretty sure I could have found something negative on any given day if I’d tried hard enough. And it’s possible that I’ve misremembered it entirely. Hmm.

If I’d met myself at uni, I probably wouldn’t have liked myself very much.

Here’s an experiment: search Wikipedia for the title of a blog post, and, if the first search result gives a page with an unambiguous opening sentence, remove citations and anything in parentheses, prepend “But” and add as a comment.

Examples:

His Dark Materials

But His Dark Materials, a trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman, comprises Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

Falling off a building is a miracle

But Genki Bakuhatsu Ganbaruger is a 47 episode animated television series, and the second series produced for the Eldran franchise funded by Tomy and produced by Sunrise.

Scarlet ‘A’

But A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and published in 1887.

Jacoby-Shermer debate

But atheism, as a philosophical view, is the position that either affirms the nonexistence of gods or rejects theism.

God good, demons bad

But in religion, folklore, and mythology a demon is a supernatural being that has generally been described as a malevolent spirit, and in Christian terms it is generally understood as a Fallen angel, formerly of God.

The Mario Clone they Play in Hell

But the video game Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, created by the Nintendo and Square Enix companies, has a unique set of characters that derive both from previous installments of the Mario video game series and new characters made specifically for the game.

Head tracking with a Wii remote

But Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is a video game developed by Retro Studios and published by Nintendo for the Wii.

Northern Lights

But Northern Lights is a common name for the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere.

Merry Christmas

But holiday greetings are a selection of greetings that are often spoken with good intentions to strangers, family, friends, or other people during the months of December and January.

The game itself is apparently downloadable from here, but I haven’t gathered the courage to do it yet. Don’t know if I ever I will.

This is pretty cool. I’d be interested to see whether it creates noticeable depth perception (i.e. without using proper stereo effects).

The right side of a boat is called starboard, okay?

Now if everyone who reaches this site by searching for “whats the right side of boat called” can just move along.

Heh.

Just wrote this in Lisp:

(defmacro dotimes-nested ((&rest vars) &body body)
  (if (null vars)
      `(progn ,@body)
      `(dotimes (,(caar vars) ,(cadar vars))
        (dotimes-nested ,(cdr vars)
          ,@body))))

I think I’m in love.

If you saw this collection of images on the SMH website, and didn’t already know the context, what would it mean to you?

Oh, there is one other thing.

Irregular Podcast #5 (and transcript).

As much as I try to make as many purchases as possible using That Intarweb Thingy, there are situations when I have to provide my credit card details over the phone. (No, not that situation.) Whenever I do, I usually take a quick look over my shoulder to check that nobody’s listening. If I’m at work, there are at least half a dozen people within earshot who would probably have my credit card number now if they ever had the desire to take it. At least a couple of times I’ve heard someone else reciting their credit card number, and I always have access to a pen and paper at my desk.

It occurred to me that you could fairly easily use what amounts to a one-time pad to make sure that the only people who know your credit card number are you and the person on the other end of the phone. Basically the operator gives you some random digits, four at a time. You add each digit to the corresponding digit in your credit card number, and tell the result, modulo 10, to the operator.

So, say my credit card number starts with 9108. The operator gives me the random numbers 4, 7, 9, 7. I do a quick bit of mental arithmetic, and come up with 3, 8, 9, 5. Repeat for the rest of the number, and possibly do something similar for the expiry date. The operator subtracts those numbers (or has data entry software that does it automatically), and away we go.

The most obvious problem is that you have to do some mental gymnastics that, even if you happen to be able to do that without clutching your head and moaning, you have a good chance of getting wrong at least once out of 16 times. And if you do it on paper, it defeats the purpose, for the same reason that making people change their passwords so often that they have to write them down defeats the purpose. And it doesn’t really do much about anyone who can get hold of your bank statement, or decides to glance in your wallet, or has access to any of the records held by any of the companies where you’ve used your credit card, or, for that matter, the operator you’ve just gone through this whole process with. But hey, the appearance of security is all that matters, right? That’s how airports work at least.

There are a few simpler variations you could use that, while they don’t have the strength of a one-time pad, introduce enough permutations of possible credit card numbers that it won’t help anyone who’s listening. Most of the time the first 8 or so digits are common between a whole family of cards, so you could cut down the obfuscation to the last 8. You could restrict the range of random numbers, say -2 to 2, to make the arithmetic easier. Or instead of adding mod 10, the operator could ask for the digits in a random order.

Anyway, I’m not expecting this to be something any company would do to make themselves popular with their customers. But maybe they could train their operators to do it if asked, to cater for the more geeky and paranoid among us.