Friday, March 4

watch that finger

No, not this one, but the interesting research that has emerged about what a difference in length between the index and ring fingers can say about a human male. The BBC reports.

A male is more aggressive when the index finger is shorter compared to the ring finger. Perhaps it's typical enthusiastic overstatment on the part of the researching academic, but there is an aura of definitive "get with the program, why dontcha" in this quote...
"For example, if you had a group of runners and they were about to start a race I could predict reasonably well who was going to win based on their finger length ... ".

This prediction, interestingly enough, doesn't apply to females. Yet more things to blame on the nuts and bolts.

A researcher has come up with a brilliant idea to uniquely fingerprint any machine based on the clock skew. Despite some rumblings about the size of the test set (only done on a lab of 60 odd machines), it seems like a brilliant technique. This comment refutes up my intuitive "this can't work in the real world" suspicion with facts and figures. But how about the crypto textbook Birthday paradox ? The chances of a repeating skew pattern has to be mapped into a space of 240,000 elements. I'd suspect that isn't large enough to apply to any machine on the internet...

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