Legal Humor

Stasi files emerge through software

This story is a few months old, but it is really cool, so we thought we would share it with you all.
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The contents of files of the former East German secret police, the Stasi - which were destroyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall - are slowly emerging after being pieced back together through new software developed in Berlin.

The fragments are scanned and then matched up to form a complete image. The researches stress they do not read the files, only reconstruct them.

The E-Puzzler system, developed at the capital's Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology, works by scanning the fragments of the documents into a computer image file.

Then, by treating each scrap as if part of a jigsaw, the information gathered by the notorious agency is being restored.

"It is the biggest puzzle in the world," Bertram Nicolai, head of the Security and Testing department at the Fraunhofer Institute, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

"The goal of the pilot project is the automatic, virtual reconstruction of 400 bags. It is very important for German history."

Reconstruction process

Almost as soon as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 - signalling the end of Communism - Stasi agents set about trying to destroy their files, first with shredders, and then with their hands.

Within weeks, they had filled 16,000 sacks with 600 million fragments.

Two years later, following reunification, German officials started trying to recreate the files by hand - but it became clear it was going to take too long.

Then researchers came up with the E-Puzzler, and managed to get a government grant.

The system analyses shape, colour, texture and thickness of the paper, so that it is eventually possible to rebuild an electronic image of the original document.

"It will be a long job - but that's the interesting part," said the Fraunhofer's Jan Schneider.

"First we have to digitise all the pieces from the bags. This is done by a special high-speed scanning device.

"The next step is to segment the image itself from the raw scan - we need the outline of the pieces, pixel-wise, to perform the reconstruction process after that.

"Then all digitised pieces of paper are stored in the database. After that we reconstruct a lot of the descriptive features of the pieces."

However, at the former Stasi prison Hohenschonhausen, the main place political prisoners were held and subjected to torture, there are criticisms that the process has already taken too long.

"I think it comes a little bit late," said Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the site, which is also a museum.

"Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Wall we start to reconstruct these Stasi files, which are really important: the most important files were the ones they destroyed.

"I am happy that now it is going forward, but it is late."

Story from BBC NEWS

Not sure if we should be scared or not....

Overall, very intimidating, but those tan lines just make me crack up everytime I see him!!

Laundry Win

The Heart actually thought this was funny. I offer, from Failblog, the man's laundry tag.

The SUV Song

I played this for The Brain the other day, and as a Durango Driver he very much appreciated the song. If you click the title of this post you can listen to the song. If it does not work then google the following: Veggie Tales SUV song.

Larry- I like your car
Girl- I like Yours too
Larry- Is It a Jeep?
Girl- A Subaru
Larry- I like your tires
Girl- You've got nice chrome
Larry- A trailer Hitch ?
Girl- Left Mine at Home
Larry- Oh your suspension it suspends me over heights I've never known
Girl- And your roll bar is to die for by the way I like your chrome
Larry-You already said that
Girl- did I ?
Larry-yeah
Girl- oh
Both: Oh you and me in our sport utility vehicles crusin to 7-11 for a bag of frito laysOh you and me in our sport Utility Vehicles we'll slam into 4 wheel and pick up a dozen eggs and if there ever was a snow
Girl- A really really deep snow
Larry: And if everyone was stuck but us
Girl- We'd be the ones not stuck
Larry: then we could be the heroes
Girl- We could be the heroes
Both- we could be the herooooooos
Girl- We would push them and pull them
Larry: push them and pull them
Both- Push them and pull them right out of the snow

Girl- I like your car
Larry- I like yours too
Girl- Periwinkle?
Larry- its baby blue
Girl- hows it handle?
Larry- Like a dream
Girl- How 'bout coffee
Larry- and then Ice cream!
Both- o you and me in out sport utility vehicles crusin to Dunkin Donuts for a cup of steaming Joe oh you and me in our sport utility vehicles we'll slam into 4-wheel drive for a scoop of rocky road
Girl- and if we ever go campin,.. you know
Larry- haven't been but one day.. I'll go
Girl- And we find a ranger stuck in a ditch
Both- a nice ranger in a deep ditch
Larry- we could be the heroes
Girl- we could be the heroes
Both- we could be the heroes
Girl- we would push him and pull him
Larry- push him and pull him
Both- Push him and pull him right out of that ditch

Larry- I like your car
Girl- I like yours too
Larry- Is it a Jeep?
Both- Its my sport Utility Vehicle

Quote of the Week

"Action movies have car chases, and explosions, and budgets, and, um, what's the word I'm looking for here, ... yeah, FANS."

--Will Smith, on the category that gets ripped off every year (this year included) at the Oscars.

Stimulus plan?

Our new president has been circulating a plan to offer $850 billion dollars as a stimulus for the economy. How much money is that? Well, after a friend offered one version of what could be done with that much money, I decided to check on whether it was accurate. Following please find my rough calculations:

23 karat gold leaf is approximately $35 per square foot.

An interstate highway lane is 12 feet wide, with a ten foot shoulder on the right and four feet on the left, or 38 feet per direction. Averaging in cities where there are more lanes, we'll call it 40 feet per direction, or 80 feet of pavement.

A mile is 5280 feet, so 5280 * 80 = 422,400 square feet per highway mile. At $35 / square foot, this is $14,784,000 to gild a mile of highway in both directions. In order to preserve the number of significant digits we have at the beginning, we need to round this to $15 million.

According to wikipedia, there are 46,837 miles of interstate highways in the United States. At the unrounded rate, this is $692,438,208,000, at an even $15M/mi it comes out to $702.555 billion, but again, because of the significant digits, we need to call it $700 billion. Out of a stimulus package of $850 billion, this leaves $150 billion for labor to gild the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System, shoulder to shoulder on both sides.*

So should we go forward with the stimulus plan? For my two cents worth, a shiny gold highway system would look way cooler from space, making this choice easy. Heck, it would probably create more jobs than the stimulus plan, anyway.


*This equation, of course, leaves out the effect trying to buy up that much gold leaf would have on the market price of said leaf, and accordingly, the increases in price for this project before it can be completed. And probably lots of other stuff that is important to coming up with a realistic scenario. But I'm not putting out a bid on this...

Never bring a bow to a gun fight

At least, under normal circumstances.

Running into two CCW permit holders should be considered normal circumstances. Not much else about the situation was normal, though.

Woman wounded by civilians, police officer after shooting father's coworker with an arrow.

'Carbon cost' of Google revealed -BBC

2 google searches = 1 kettle of boiling water

I think I may need to cut down my tea intake so that I can keep my research up...

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Two search requests on the internet website Google produce "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle", according to a Harvard University academic. US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.

However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide.

A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.

Dr Wissner-Gross's study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.

Carbon emissions

The Harvard academic argues that these carbon emissions stem from the electricity used by the computer terminal and by the power consumed by the large data centres operated by Google around the world.

Although the American search engine is renowned for returning fast results, Dr Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time.

Speaking to the BBC, he said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people's home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage.

"Google isn't any worse than any other data centre operator. If you want to supply really great and fast result, then that's going to take extra energy to do so," he said.

Dr Wissner-Gross said he was working on a website called co2stats.com which helps companies identify "energy inefficient" aspects of their websites.

In a statement on its official blog, Google said that Dr Wissner-Gross' figures were "many times too high."

The firm said that a typical search returned a result in less than 0.2 seconds and that the search itself only used its servers for a few thousandths of a second. This, said Google, amounted to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search - equivalent to 0.2g of CO2.

"We've made great strides to reduce the energy used by our data centres, but we still want clean and affordable sources of electricity for the power that we do use," said Google in its statement.

"In 2007, we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. This non-profit consortium is committed to cutting the energy consumed by computers in half by 2010 and so reducing global CO2 emissions by 54 million tons per year. That's a lot of kettles."

On Strange Case Names, Part II

This just seen:

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, 735 F.2d 895 (5th Cir.1984).

(Part I here)

Fed Cuts Interest Rate Below 0%

"Desperate times call for desperate measures," says Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

WASHINGTON - After the meeting of the Federal Reserve Board this afternoon, the Fed has announced that it is cutting its funds rate to -0.5% for the first time in history. "Given the current economy's sluggishness, we thought it would be a good idea to literally pay people to take our money," commented Bernanke at a press conference to announce the decision, "Hopefully, this will restart consumer spending without consumers having to worry about where they will get the money to pay off the loan, not that they really ever worry about that anyway. Instead, the consumer can focus on making purchases, secure in the knowledge that the loan will actually get smaller over time." When asked about the danger of consumers making no maintenance payments on the loan, but letting the loan simply dissipate over time, Bernanke dismissed the idea. "Negative interest just doesn't work that way. We have a whole new paradigm to work with. It's an actual example of the cricket that always jumps half the distance and can never get to his target." After letting his eyes glaze over while doing some quick math in his head, the Fed chief finished by stating, "besides, at a mere negative half point, even after fifty years, less than a third of the debt will have paid itself off; at that point, you're applying barely over 30 cents on the thousand dollars. It would be several hundred years before you would even start to have significant rounding errors."

Alternative Medicine

The Heart: Have you ever been to the chiropractor?

The Brain: No. Well, yes, but only for a deposition.

The Heart: That is not exactly what I meant.

The Brain: I know, that is why I said "no" first.

Abstract Thoughts

"If I had a hundred dollars for every time I wanted a hundred dollars, I would have spent all my hundred dollarses, and would have nothing."

(The Brain while pondering Christmas presents for the family)

Lost Church

Russian church 'taken by thieves'

A 200-year-old church building has disappeared from a village in central Russia, officials from the Russian Orthodox Church say.

The building had stood near the village of Komarovo since 1809.

It was intact in July but some time in early October thieves made off with it brick by brick, they said.

Local prosecutors had been informed and an investigation was under way, a spokesman for the local Russian Orthodox Church said.

The disappearance of the Church of the Resurrection, some 300 km (186 miles) north-east of Moscow, was not immediately noticed.

It was in an out-of-the-way area and was not being used, although Church officials were considering resuming services there.

Now all that remained of the two-storey building - a school before it was turned over to the Church - were its foundations and some sections of wall, the Church said.

Thieves often target churches in rural Russia. Religious icons can be sold and church structures sold off for building materials.

Story from BBC NEWS

Compare:

Ours may be leaner and have slightly more pronounced pects, but theirs has more solid abs and thicker arms.

We're doomed.