We all know that perpetual motion of the 1st or 2nd kind is impossible, but this has not deterred inventors from coming up with new ways to attain this dream. The US Patent Office, for instance, has granted several perpetual motion patents in recent history, against its long-standing policy. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that inventors are getting more sophisticated. Unbalanced wheels and magnets are giving way to holograms, forcing scientists to make connections between fields that would not have been made otherwise. Perpetual motion of the Third Kind, which seeks to produce infinite exergy rather than infinite energy, has made its appearance, and it seems that new laws of Thermodynamics would need to be added in order to forbid it. This paper studies not only the “science” behind perpetual motion, but also the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of a pursuit that would not go away.
Month: May 2016
Tristano grammar
This the grammar for Tristano, also known as “Common Speech” in some of my novels. It is what think Esperanto would eventually become if people actually used it. Read More
IIT Alma Mater
A few years ago, the school where I work decided to change its Alma Mater because nobody could remember the tune, and much less the words. There was a contests and, what do you know, I won (against very little competition, truth be said). Read on to see the words and hear the music of “IIT, You Mean to Me” (or, “IIT, you’re mean to me,” as most people sing it). Read More
Calculator-based cryptography
You think you need a computer to have a high-security code? Think again. I am about to tell you how to encrypt a message with as much security as you want, using just a common calculator. The name of this code is “root”, because the calculator’s square root key is what makes it secure.
Perpetual motion from light
Perpetual Motion Machines are those that would produce free, endless power, thus ending all of humanity’s energy problems (and maybe some political ones at the same time). I am not going to embarrass myself showing pictures of my early perpetual motion machines on this page, since you can find some very similar ones (guess which ones they are) going to this excellent website. What this article is about is a kind of perpetual motion machine that so far I haven”t been able to prove how it doesn’t work. Maybe you will…
Possible perpetual motion
What do you know? It seems there is a new kind of Perpetual Motion Machine, which would give free energy for ever, and Nature hasn’t managed to pass a law against it (just yet, at any rate). Read on if you’re strong-hearted (warning: contents under heavy math)…
PassLok in the UK
It is already illegal for a Briton to refuse to surrender his/her/its password to law-enforcement authorities, and Prime Minister Cameron is now trying to make all non-backdoored encryption illegal as well. What can you do if you are affected by this situation?
Modified interlock protocol for authentication
Of the many difficult problems dealing with public key cryptography, there are few so hard to crack as public key authentication. Public keys are easy to obtain (that’s why they are “public”), and because of this, it is hard to be sure that a certain key belongs to a certain person, what is known as authentication. Usually it is recommended that the key be handed out in person or that it be identified (directly or through a one-way hash) by a rich communication medium such as voice or video.
Lessons from the VIC cipher
In the mid-1950’s, the Soviet spy Reino Hayhanen, codenamed VIC, and his handler Rudolph Abel (in the picture) pulled off an incredible feat: they utilized a paper-and-pencil cipher that not even the FBI (the NSA wasn’t operating within US borders back then) was able to crack until Hayhanen defected and explained its inner workings. Computers already existed, and they were used primarily to crack ciphers like VIC. In this article, I go over some of its features, and how they can be used to enhance other simple ciphers. Read More