More Smithsonian Spy Stories

See Oleg Gordievsky.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stefan Molyneux on Resource Based Economy

Image
This is an interesting discussion. What most people don't realise is that capitalism as we practice it now wastes 99.9% of the human and material resources we currently use. Once you realise that, the problems raised by the idea of gift or resource-based economies become much more tractable. At  10 minutes 30 seconds  the discussion turns to the way we treat our family and friends differently. We don't charge our nearest and dearest. At this point Molyneux brings in Neo-Darwinian evolution to explain why there is this difference between the way we treat our kith and kin to the way we treat everybody else. I guess he will go on to argue that this is because we evolved to be like this, otherwise we would not have survived. He will presumably say that this is human nature and because it is genetically determined, nothing we can do short of a programme of eugenics and euthenasia will change that. Well, ... you know what my answer to that will be, ... something along the lines...
Read more

Ben Eater on Running a Breadboard at 1MHz

Image
It works fine! This is a really useful video showing lots of basics of digital electronics. See  https://eater.net/6502  for kits and videos. Here's an idea for a little project based on Ben's kits. Make a high-speed bidirectional communications link between two asynchronously-clocked 6502 CPUs using a couple of blocks of, say, 2KB SRAM (on separate chips) which have their address logic controlled by the outputs of the 6522 PIAs in such a way that each CPU can write data onto one of the chips and then switch that chip onto the address and data bus of the other CPU. You will need a few tri-state buffer elements to do this. How about doing a PCB link module with, say, an ICE-40 FPGA implementing this functionality and providing a pair of header-pins that could be used to bridge two breadboards? The next idea is to design a PCB with four 6502 CPUs, each connected via one of these link modules to two others in a square, and having four sets of headers around the edge ...
Read more

Richard Kauffman on The Chinese Wuhan Virus Tests

Image
He says the first tests used in Wuhan were based on a technique used to develop indicators for certain types of lung cancer. They are RT PCR , which is PCR on RNA sequences. An indicator is not a test, it is merely a data point which can be combined statistically with others to provide a whole set of tests which one hopes will be more or less effective in detecting some type of cancer. At  10 minutes 16 seconds  on the 80% false-positive rate, see  Hannah Fry - How to Bend The Rules  at  16 minutes 33 seconds At  24 minutes 4 seconds , on exosomes and viruses, see  How Viruses Work ,  Britt Glaunsinger on the Genomics of SARS-CoV2  and this, from  7 minutes 4 seconds : See  This Shows The Sort of People Behind Outbreaks of Viral BS . In particular, this video in which Wolfgang Wodarg mentions a test developed in Berlin that was 'fast-track' approved by the WHO. According to this  CDC Web Page on Rapid Mo...
Read more