Month: November 2015

Mist

Henry David Thoreau

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.

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My campsite for the night

Fog in Henry Coe State Park,
a wild place barely 20 miles from San Jose.
(c) 2010 Robert W Harrison

How to pretend you know how to draw.

These sketches make it look like I’m one heck of an artist, don’t they?
Ha! There’s a very good reason I write books. These were done using a bamboo pad and photographs (albeit ones I took). The images are from the UK, on various trips, and other than Jess (the dog) are what you find on footpaths.jess2horsecows2welsh_cat1

I drew on top of the originals, in a separate layer. Neat.

By the way, beware of the cows.

FrankenKitty 6 #wewriwar #amwriting #weareparis

Frankenkitty

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Welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors.  This is a sample from my work in progress, “Frankenkitty”, and I hope you enjoy it.  It started out as a young-adult superhero book, and well, you’ll see. Last week they met Mrs. Jones, nee von Volkstein. Despite the premature reports of her death, Mrs. Jones was still alive. This week they start in on making the surprisingly powerful “pink solution.”

Amber, Mary and Jennifer spent an enjoyable afternoon reading the recipe. It was written on an enormous scale, starting with a hogshead of distilled or clean rainwater.
“That will never work,” Amber said, “We’ll have to scale it down.”

Some of the ingredients were easy to find, but many were decidedly oddball, and it took several passes through search engines to find modern names.

Jennifer scowled, “Red Cinnabar? Eight Drachms, what the heck’s a Drachm?”

Mary laughed, “Mercury sulfide, Amber, is your dad going to let us play with that? It’s poisonous.”

Amber pulled a dusty bottle from a shelf, “It was Grandpa’s; a Drachm is an old measure of weight; Look it up.”

Jennifer’s fingers were the fastest on her phone, “3.8879346 grams,” she laughed, “It says that’s three scruples.”

This is a work in progress. In other news, I’ve become a booktrope author, but more on that latter. It has meant a change in pen-name. Last Weeks is here and you can read the whole last chapter if you’d rather.

I’m also looking for reviewers for my nearly ready book “The Curious Profession of Dr. Craven”

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A Fun Thing to do with Young Children

This is a trick we used to do in Cub Scouts:
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Baking in a box. Take moderate-sized box, we usually used one the size used to deliver copier paper came in (24cm x 24cm x 48cm or so). Line the inside of the box and the lid with aluminium foil  (staples are a good way to attach it to the lid.) Put some stones or a tile on the bottom, both to hold down the box and to protect it from the coals. Run a few coat-hanger wires through about 2/3 of the way up to form a rack.

Light charcoal (this needs adult help or supervision), putting about 10 briquettes in an pan. The pan goes in the bottom of the box. When the lid is on the box, the air inside it will get to about 300-350 F (150-200C) which is well below the ignition temperature of paper, but more than hot enough to bake with.  A small tray with cookies or biscuits can go on the rack and after a few minutes will be baked. Since the temperature depends on how well the lid seals (there has to be some leakage to keep the coals burning, but this isn’t usually a problem), the exact baking time and temperature will vary.

Still it’s good fun, requires little advance preparation, and can be put together by 8-11 year old children without much assistance from mom or dad. Beats an “easy-bake” any  day.

Traditional Thanksgiving Turkey #recipe

This is our traditional way of preparing the thanksgiving bird.

Stuffing for a smallish turkey:

  • one loaf white bread
  • one pound cheap fatty pork sausage
  • four or five stalks of celery
  • one or two onions
  • salt, pepper, thyme, sage to taste
  • two eggs

Cook the sausage, crumbled up in small bits. Chop and add the onions and celery. Cook to sweat that. It should be limp but not browned. Add about 1 teaspoon dried sage and 2 teaspoons dried thyme.
It should look something like this:
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I would taste a small amount, and possibly add pepper (< 1 teaspoon) and maybe salt (there is usually plenty in the sausage). I typically use “lite” salt that has potassium chloride because I like the extra potassium in my diet.

While it’s cooking clean the bird, remembering to remove the neck and gizzards (use them to make gravy).
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Salt both the outside and inside of the bird. (The red dot is from a thermometer plug that’s common in the USA.) Find a pan which will fit it.
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Coarsely cut the bread into cubes and add to the mixture. Add the eggs to it and mix.
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I will typically deglaze the pan by putting about 1/2 cup of water in it and reducing that to about half the volume. It removes the brown, tasty residue from the pan and converts it into a brown, tasty liquid that gets added to the stuffing.

Stuff the bird. Cover in foil and bake at a moderate heat (300F, 150C) until done. I usually remove the foil about an hour before serving to let it color up.
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Morning Joy

Claude McKay

At night the wide and level stretch of wold,
Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold,
Far as the eye could see was ghostly white;
Dark was the night save for the snow’s weird light.

I drew the shades far down, crept into bed;
Hearing the cold wind moaning overhead
Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain,
Went sorrowing with it across the plain.

At dawn, behold! the pall of night was gone,
Save where a few shrubs melancholy, lone,
Detained a fragile shadow. Golden-lipped
The laughing grasses heaven’s sweet wine sipped.

The sun rose smiling o’er the river’s breast,
And my soul, by his happy spirit blest,
Soared like a bird to greet him in the sky,
And drew out of his heart Eternity.

Training the Next Generation

My day job involves warping, um teaching young minds the art of computer programming. Every now and then I get to slip in something fun.

This assignment is one where the students do a completely automated decryption of what was up until well after WW2 a state of the art cryptosystem.  While I did weaken it a little (a short key rather than a very long one), the linearity of the cipher is a fundamental weakness. More than a few of the students did the whole project, and at least one found it pretty cool. Cool enough to think about working for one of those un-nameable three letter agencies.

The basic techniques were used at Bletchley Park both for Enigma and Lorenz.

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Although largely by hand (until they built the machines) in small dark offices like this one. (Turing’s). Could you do it?

Assignment 8

RWH

due November 5 2015

Another encryption assignment

  1. Vernam Encryption Write a program in C that will encrypt a file use XOR and a Vernam key. A Vernam key is a short string. (The real system used a much longer random sequence.) Read the input at low level, as binary data (hint unsigned char is useful here.) Then xor each character in the binary data with the character in the key. When you get to the end of the key reuse the key from the beginning.

The program should take command line arguments for the key, input and output.

./vern abc input.clear output.encrypted

Note that the cipher should decrypt its own output. The command:

./vern abc output.encrypted input.clear

should recover the original input. If you use open to create the output file, you may want to also set O RDWR or O WRONLY as well as O CREAT. You could also use fread and fwrite for this problem.

  1. Finding the period

This cipher is vulnerable if the key repeats, and with a short key, like abc above, it will repeat many times for any reasonably sized input.

The incidence of coincidence slides the cipher along itself and counts the number of times the same symbol is seen.

ABCABCABC            count is 9

ABCABCABC then shift 1 ABCABCABC        count is 0

ABCABCABC then shift 2 ABCABCABC      count is 0

ABCABCABC then shift 3 ABCABCABC    count is 6

ABCABCABC

Clearly the period is 3.

Write the code to do that. The file classcipher.vrn is in my directory for this.

  1. EXTRA CREDIT The character ’ ’ (space) is most common in English text. After finding the period count the most common character for each period and recover the key by XOR’ing it with ’ ’.

Swamp Critters

From a trip to the Lafitte wilderness, just south of New Orleans. Well worth braving the mosquitos.
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The Thaw

Henry David Thoreau

I saw the civil sun drying earth’s tears —
Her tears of joy that only faster flowed,

Fain would I stretch me by the highway side,
To thaw and trickle with the melting snow,
That mingled soul and body with the tide,
I too may through the pores of nature flow.

But I alas nor tinkle can nor fume,
One jot to forward the great work of Time,
‘Tis mine to hearken while these ply the loom,
So shall my silence with their music chime.

Mnemosyne

Trumbull Stickney

It’s autumn in the country I rememberHow warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.

It’s cold abroad the country I remember.

The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain
At midday with a wing aslant and limber;
And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain

It’s empty down the country I remember.

I had a sister lovely in my sight:
Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;
We sang together in the woods at night.

It’s lonely in the country I remember.

The babble of our children fills my ears,
And on our hearth I stare the perished ember
To flames that show all starry thro’ my tears.

It’s dark about the country I remember.

There are the mountains where I lived. The path
Is slushed with cattle-tracks and fallen timber,
The stumps are twisted by the tempests’ wrath.

But that I knew these places are my own,
I’d ask how came such wretchedness to cumber
The earth, and I to people it alone.

It rains across the country I remember.

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