Words and Pictures - June and July

A poorly scoped upgrade to my hosting left me without an easy way to publish until I rebuilt the entire world… entirely… and stuff. More on that later. In the meantime here’s my favourite reading from the last two months.

• Ars Technica - Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” - You’ll be amazed how easily your carefully chosen passwords are cracked; Enjoy the read, then get a password manager and have it create strong passwords for you. Mac users can do worse than 1Password (I use it)
• Hayley Campbell - My Life As An Amateur Taxidermist - I laughed so hard that I cried (while on public transport).
• Kieran Healy - Using Metadata To Find Paul Revere - How an expert can draw conclusions from a seemingly trivial data set. A case-in-point why I don’t have a Google account and don’t do Facebook. And the article helped me find out who Paul Revere is.
• Geoffrey Pullum - Speech Recognition vs. Language Processing and Machine Translation Without the Translation - Great (and sometimes humorous) analysis on why text and language processing is useful in limited areas but is still far from perfect.
• Antonio Mendez - Master of Disguise - A retired CIA agent tells interesting stories from his career, including the story on which the movie Argo was based. The first few chapters were a little slow, but it was very engaging from then on.
• Michael Finkel (National Geographic) - Australia’s Aboriginals - Life in a remote Aboriginal town; wonderful and saddening at the same time. Support Indigenous Literacy Day on September 4.