KNBR (AM 680) Antennas, Redwood City, CA, 2024. All the pixels, none of the hazards to aviation, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/54131419266 #photography

Just got a letter from a place I haven’t worked at for eight years (UPenn) telling me that my personal data was leaked by a company I’ve never done business with (Oracle), and so they’re giving me two years of credit monitoring with another company (Equifax) to make up for it. The future isn’t everything it was cracked up to be.

I'm just imagining what the reaction would have been if Obama had suggested renaming NFL football. They would have had to put him in witness protection.

While we're all appreciating the late Tom Stoppard, I want to throw in a good word for his under-appreciated espionage drama Hapgood. I missed the original West End production (in 1988), but was mesmerized by the version he revised for Stockard Channing at Lincoln Center in 1994. You can find many of the same physics and math themes in his later (and much more critically successful) Arcadia, but I think Hapgood deserves to be better known than it is.

It's December 2nd, which means that for the next 23 days, there's a high probability that you will encounter the classic film A Christmas Story broadcast on TV or streaming services. One of the plot points in the film concerns decrypting a radio message from Orphan Annie's Secret Society, which was based on a real radio program of the era. A while back I wrote up a little post on the (basic, but still interesting) cryptography involved.

Matt Blaze: The Cryptography of Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight