Awesome Time

Those of you who know me know my stance in the creationism “debate” - I’m sure at some point I’ll write a big ranting piece on it here if some super-Jesus-y school board decides they want to be the next ones to mess with high school science classes in the name of “balance.”

For now, though, I point you to PZ Myers at TalkReason, who, laughing almost to the point of tears, relays this story of what happened to him last Friday…

Enjoy.

I can’t believe I live in a world where someone very much responsible for “The Hulk” gets to make out multiple times in the span of 90 minutes with both Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. What kind of moral example is that setting?

My vote for male lead in this movie? Me. My improvisational skills would be stellar.

“Natalie! Scarlett! Don’t fight. You can both have me. TOGETHER!”

I came across an op-ed piece by William Poundstone in today’s New York Times that really opened my eyes on some methods for discouraging election fraud, especially when using electronic voting machines. Poundstone, author of the shortly-to-be-released Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), highlights a system proposed by Drs. Warren D. Smith, a math professor at Temple, and Ronald L. Rivest, a professor of computer science at MIT who helped invent RSA encryption (he’s the ‘R’).

With computing power increasing exponentially, it’s continually getting easier for someone with enough computer knowledge (and you don’t need much) to break into an electronic voting machine and alter the vote counts. Even more worrisome is that the manufacturers of these machines don’t seem to be taking the security of our votes as seriously as they perhaps ought to. Remember the Diebold e-voting scandal from a few years ago? Unfortunately, even a simple paper record of how you voted is no defense against a fraud-minded election worker. It also doesn’t comfort those who prefer to keep their votes secret, and the secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of a good democracy. Or your ballot could simply be lost…

Who better, then, than two of the country’s finest minds in the field of cryptography and information security, to talk about a way to keep our elections secure? What Rivest and Smith have come up with is brilliantly elegant, pleasantly democratic, and ironically simple.

You don’t encrypt the machines. You throw the doors open on the whole system and make everyone an enforcer.

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