Starlog #1

As much as I enjoy academic study, signing up to do an actual university course/degree/whatever is expensive and completing a Masters is probably as far as I’m going to go with that. Other than cost, what would I even study further?! My undergraduate degree is software engineering but my postgraduate study was religion, politics and conflict resolution lol. My interests are kind of spread wide rather than going into a lot of depth (although, I suppose completing a degree is some depth!).

I used to do the odd Open University module when it was more subsidised by the government but now… At least they and other academic institutions have gotten on the MOOC-train and offer online courses, that are mostly free. I’ve just started Star Trek: Inspiring Culture and Technology which the Smithsonian is offering on edX. As much as I love Star Wars, I love Star Trek more, so combining Star Trek and academic study is right up my alley.

Since I’ve complete the first unit of the course, I’ll add the Chief Warrant Officer insignia to this post to keep track of my course rank.

Chief Warrant Officer insignia

Fake Fingerprints

A lot of the technology I have is pretty old. I don’t know that I’ll ever go in for anything that gets unlocked with a fingerprint or my face (partly because these things can change).

And then you get stuff like this: Researchers create ‘master key’ fingerprints that can fool biometric databases

Researchers from New York University have created a set of master fingerprint keys that can be used to spoof biometric identification systems.

While the database of fingerprints used by the researchers had a chance of falsely matching with a random fingerprint one out of 1000 times, the master prints they generated had the power to falsely match one out of five times.

Which, like, great.

RSS remains the greatest

From Wired “It’s Time For An RSS Revival“:

The platformization of the web has claimed many victims, RSS readers included. Google Reader’s 2013 demise was a major blow; the company offed it in favor of “products to address each user’s interest with the right information at the right time via the most appropriate means,” as it Google executive Richard Gingras put it at the time. In other words, letting Google Now decide what you want. And the popular Digg Reader, which was born in response to that shuttering, closed its doors this week after a nearly four-year run.

Despite those setbacks, though, RSS has persisted. “I can’t really explain it, I would have thought given all the abuse it’s taken over the years that it would be stumbling a lot worse,” says programmer Dave Winer, who helped create RSS.

It owes that resilience in part thanks to social media burnout. Stankov says search traffic to Inoreader has nearly doubled since 2015, all organically. “RSS readers have not only survived in the era of social media, but are driving more and more attention back to themselves, as people are realizing the pitfalls” of relying too much on Facebook and others, Stankov says.

Christian political engagement

From The Atlantic’s “The Last Temptation”:

Where did this history leave evangelicals’ political involvement?

For a start, modern evangelicalism has an important intellectual piece missing. It lacks a model or ideal of political engagement—an organizing theory of social action. Over the same century from Blanchard to Falwell, Catholics developed a coherent, comprehensive tradition of social and political reflection. Catholic social thought includes a commitment to solidarity, whereby justice in a society is measured by the treatment of its weakest and most vulnerable members. And it incorporates the principle of subsidiarity—the idea that human needs are best met by small and local institutions (though higher-order institutions have a moral responsibility to intervene when local ones fail).

In practice, this acts as an “if, then” requirement for Catholics, splendidly complicating their politics: If you want to call yourself pro-life on abortion, then you have to oppose the dehumanization of migrants. If you criticize the devaluation of life by euthanasia, then you must criticize the devaluation of life by racism. If you want to be regarded as pro-family, then you have to support access to health care. And vice versa. The doctrinal whole requires a broad, consistent view of justice, which—when it is faithfully applied—cuts across the categories and clichés of American politics. Of course, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard.

On Evangelicalism

From the Atlantic – “Trump and the Evangelical Temptation”:

The Moral Majority appeared at about the same time that the actual majority was more and more comfortable with divorce and couples living together out of wedlock. Evangelicals experienced the power of growing numbers and healthy subcultural institutions even as elite institutions—from universities to courts to Hollywood—were decisively rejecting traditional ideals.

As a result, the primary evangelical political narrative is adversarial, an angry tale about the aggression of evangelicalism’s cultural rivals. In a remarkably free country, many evangelicals view their rights as fragile, their institutions as threatened, and their dignity as assailed. The single largest religious demographic in the United States—representing about half the Republican political coalition—sees itself as a besieged and disrespected minority. In this way, evangelicals have become simultaneously more engaged and more alienated.

On International Women’s Day

From the Huffington Post, “Men Write History, But Women Live It“:

It’s mostly men who write history, and mostly men who, according to those history books, make history. But it’s women who live through the most of it. And in daily life, it’s women who do the work of remembering important names and dates and events. It’s women who write the shopping lists and birthday cards and absence notes, documents that rarely make it into our history books, while men are busy writing magazine articles and legislation ― and the history books themselves.

And really, it’s remembering the names and dates and sending the cards that creates the bonds that hold society together so maybe if everyone did it, the world could be a little better?