Category Archives: Food

Food, Security

Stolen laptop worth lifetime of beer?

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Here is an interesting new take on the value of information:

Owners were desperate to retrieve the [stolen] computer containing designs, contact details and financial information, the Rotorua Daily Post said.

They have offered free beer to anyone giving clues leading to its recovery.

Co-owner Paul Croucher said the company would provide a lifetime supply of about 12 bottles a month to anyone who could name the thief.

The company has back-up copies of the material stored on the laptop but these are not up to date, the newspaper said.

What are the chances this will work? And if it does, should security start trying to recover all laptops with beer? Makes a perfectly good excuse for storing large amounts of the beverage at the office, no?

Updated to add:

Cost of 12 beer from the company in question = $36

$36 X 12 months = $432/yr

Average lifetime of a kiwi male = 78.2

78.2 – 18 (kiwi drinking age) = 60.2

60.2 years X $432/yr = $26,006.40

The problem with this reward system, obviously, is that the type of person who might be motivated by beer as a reward is going to want more than 12 bottles a month. And the person not motivated by beer is going to want more than $432/yr. In fact, $432 is not much of a reward for a laptop and, given the questionable information security practices of the company (e.g. no current backups), is there any real guarantee that they would be around to deliver bottles for years two and three let alone in perpetuity?

Food, History, Security

Totalitarian Lawns and Johnny Appleseed

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“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

Michael Pollan apparently wrote that in Second Nature. Someone I work with pointed me to another book of his that is a study of Johnny Appleseed. I found it very compelling, especially in the sense that he looked for root-cause (pun not intended) rather than settle with the pulp of commercial drivel also known as Disney. PBS did an interview with him where he summarizes:

GWEN IFILL: So as a gardener, which you admit to being, a backyard gardener of sorts in Connecticut, how did you make these connections between human impulse and the plant world?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it all started with the bumblebee. I mean, the premise of the book is very, very simple. I… One day in the garden I was watching a bumblebee alongside me while I was sewing [sic] seeds and thought, “well, what do I have in common with a bee as a gardener?” and realized more than I realized. Like the bumblebee, I was disseminating the genes of one species, a potato instead of a leek, say, rather than another. And like the bumblebee, I thought these plants were here for my benefit, you know, all the plants in the garden I was growing. But in fact, I realized maybe they had induced me to help them, because, you know, the bumblebee breaks into the flower, finds the nectar, thinks he’s making off with the goods and thinks he’s getting the better of the deal with the flower. But, in fact, it’s the flower that has tricked the bumblebee into doing the work for him, to take his pollen from flower to flower to flower. And then I realized well, what if… So from the flower’s point of view, the bumblebee is this credulous gullible animal, and how would we look to our plants… from our plant’s point of view? And I realize we’re much the same; we’re more like the bumblebee than we think.

I love that analysis. We are gullible if we think that we are totally in control of how we choose the food we eat. People love to be led, and those that seem to want the least regulations also appear to be the ones easiest to lead. I think this is explored best in the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Anyway, back to the Appleseed story:

GWEN IFILL: Well, you tell… You talk about sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. And sweetness you talk about the apple.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

GWEN IFILL: How does Johnny Appleseed figure into this?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, Johnny Appleseed, in a way, he’s kind of a pagan patron saint of the book. I didn’t even know when I started this that he was a real historical figure, by John Chapman. I thought he was one of those kindergarten folk heroes, you know, like Paul Bunyon, that’s made up. It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory. And I also found out that the version of Johnny Appleseed I learned in kindergarten was completely wrong, had been Disney-fied, cleaned up and made very benign. He’s a much more interesting character. The way figured this out was I learned this one botanical fact about apples, which is, if you plant the seeds of an apple, like a red delicious or a golden delicious, the offspring will look nothing like the parent, will be a completely different variety and will be inedible. You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

GWEN IFILL: And they’re not American fruit.

MICHAEL POLLAN: They’re not, no. I learned it comes from Kazakhstan and has made its way here and changed a lot along the way. And so the fact that Johnny Appleseed was planting apples from seed, which he insisted on– he though grafting was wicked– meant they were not edible apples, and it meant they were for hard cider because you can use any kind of apple for making cider. Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus.

The fundamentalists who sought prohibition threated to destroy the story of Mr. Appleseed. Thus the story was somehow adapted to leave out the grain of alcohol. It also seems to leave out some of the more obvious motivation of “homesteading” land. He is portrayed as someone who was a friend of native inhabitants because he was not afraid to speak with them, while he actually was probably negotiating with them to let him “enhance” property (grow trees) in order to legally claim it as his own under nascent laws and profit from sale to a settler.

Food, Security

Another VIP RFID story

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I find VIP RFID tales annoying. I am not sure why. Maybe it is because the concept of VIP lounges in loud dance clubs appeals to me as much as the restroom at a fast food restaurant.

I have been invited into them a few times, for various reasons, but something about the “free booze and food” or “free people” does not make me feel like I have really achieved anything significant enough to give up something meaningful in return. I mean would I pay a few dollars for a beer instead of being tagged as a VIP and getting the beer for free?

In that context, a BBC reporter had a chip implanted as part of a “story” on Barcelona clubbing and using a chip to pay for drinks.

The idea of having my very own microchip implanted in my body appealed. I have always been an early adopter, so why not.

Why not? Why not? This guy is a “science producer” and he can not think of any risks from radio microchips that carry financial, let alone personal, information?

The night club offers its VIP clients the opportunity to have a syringe-injected microchip implanted in their upper arms that not only gives them special access to VIP lounges, but also acts as a debit account from which they can pay for drinks.

This sort of thing is handy for a beach club where bikinis and board shorts are the uniform and carrying a wallet or purse is really not practical.

Right, because you are really a VIP if no one can recognize you without your implants. I think he should have called himself a Very Unimportant Person with a Chip (VUPC).

The story’s perspective really started to get under my skin:

With a waiver in his hand [the owner of the club] Conrad asked me to sign my life away, confirming that if I wanted the chip removed it was my responsibility.

That seems worth it, no? They get to debit money from you without any transparency and you get…drinks.

The chip responds to a signal when a scanner is held near it and supplies its own unique ID number.

The number can then be linked to a database that is linked to other data, at the Baja beach club it make charges to a customers account.

If I want to leave the club then I can have it surgically removed – a pretty simple procedure similar to having it put in.

Sounds so painless. I can think of nothing less VIP-like than needing implants linked to a database, linked to other data, that charges an account. Then again, as I said, I have never really found the VIP clubbing concept appealing. Whether whisked in on a red carpet or allowed to sneak in through the back door, I would never go with an implant chip for VIP access especially if it required waiving all rights.

The real pain was the sore head the following day after a night on an open bar tab.

Uh, yeah. I think he means the real point of the story…

Food, Security

Chewing as a Sign of Weakness

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I noticed a book in a store the other day that claimed to be a reprint of the WWII US Army guide to Iraqi culture. I should have bought it, as the topic keeps coming into focus lately. Wired wrote about this as well and even attempted to show dismay with some of the suggestions. Maybe I’ll go back.

In the meantime, I have been reading anecdotes about how the modern Army wants to be culturally savvy, but just does not seem able to understand how to influence local populations in a positive way.

Identity is a funny thing. A Glimpse of Iraq points out a classic example of how two cultures in sudden proximity might end up with dangerously opposite perspectives:

It is probably perfectly normal for an adult American to be seen chewing gum in public. In traditional Iraqi society, the act of chewing a gum is reserved to women, but never in public. Country folk utterly despise city boys when they see them chewing gum. They regard it as feminine. Even little children are discouraged from doing it. The sight of grown, armed men chewing gum must have been one of the causes of many people losing their respect for those armed men! It simply conveys an unintentionally ‘undesirable’ image!

This also reminds me of a young US soldier manning the Iraqi side of the Iraqi-Jordanian border. He glanced at our passports with a lollypop in his mouth. I couldn’t help but notice the reaction on the taxi driver’s face: Utter contempt!

While an American might see a calm, collected, even playful and welcoming person, and Iraqi might see a scared, weak and disrespectful one. Then again, many Americans see chewing gum as disrespectful as well, the difference thus only being the environment. In other words, an American soldier manning a border might not be trained to respect the normal people who might try to cross, whereas they are most certainly trained to respect a superior officer and respect their military buildings.

Although it is tempting to chalk up the gum as a matter of cultural differences in a general sense, I think it may in fact be a reflection of very poor management by the American military. Soldiers have been given specific instructions on how to kill but perhaps not yet how to treat foreign civilians with respect. The interesting question becomes whether the latter has as much security relevance as the former; especially as it might be too late, or too costly, to turn back public opinion.