A walk around the neighborhood on a cloudy day.

Here are three TED Talks that illuminate today’s large-scale psychological warfare. The first talk is about how businesses created the perfect weapons for mass psychological warfare, the “persuasion platforms”. The next two talks are about how Russia has been using these persuasion platforms in the US, Great Britain, and increasingly in other parts of the world.

Using Apple’s ARKit to put a Mars crater on my kitchen table. This is my weekend project of visualizing digital terrain data. It’s nice to take a break from cyber security.

Just a quick update of my weekend project first mentioned in the “Flying over DEM Data" post. The 5 km x 5 km grid of elevation data is from Canada’s polar region.

There is a famous parable called the Scorpion and the Fox. Facebook is clearly a scorpion. Central to their business is the collection of as much information as possible about people, so Facebook can help their customers optimally manipulate you. Facebook just can’t help itself but behave the way it does.

Corporate officers of Yahoo! have been successfully sued over their actions that led to multiple breaches at Yahoo! The officers (actually their insurance company) will pay $29 million.

First test of my iOS app flying over Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data on my iPad Pro. Colors are based on elevation, and black is shown where there was no data.

I woke up this morning, the first day of my winter holiday, thinking, while still in that quasi-dream-wake state, about the origins of life. This is what you get when going to sleep listening to biology books.

When I was about 11 years old I learned two lessons: Sea-Monkeys were not really aquatic primates and marketing departments lie. The second was a good lesson to learn.

In 1976 I learned what a googol was through a clever Richie Rich mystery. 21 years later the founders of a search engine botched the spelling of the word when they registered their new domain name, but I think they might approve of the villain’s words on the comic’s cover - NOTHING CAN STOP THE '“GOOGOL” NOW!