Ben Mann Monthly Nov 2021
Ben Mann Monthly Nov 2021
Lots of movies, penetration testing, cheese, cinnamon, airships
Purpose
An index for my memory
A menu of topics for my next conversation with you
A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it
A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable
Experiments and experiences
Stabbing Diana (with consent)
Diana ordered an at-home blood test. They shipped her a small spring-loaded knife (lancet) she could use to prick her finger. In video instructions, they suggested running her hands under hot water, doing jumping jacks, and squeezing her arm to increase blood flow. None of those worked. Invariably a few seconds after pricking, she'd get maybe one good drop and dry up. She needed four. I took apart the lancet device, extracted the blade, and on her mark shoved it into her finger. The first time I didn't go deep enough and yet again her platelets did their duty. The second time I pressed a few millimeters in, and the blood flowed freely onto the waiting card. Sharp knives leave clean wounds. By the end of the day she took off the bandaid with no obvious marking.
Zeppelin cross Atlantic, forecasting rocket transit
My brother now lives in Finland. I'd love to visit him, but the trip is far, so it's one I won't take lightly. On our regular call, I mentioned offhandedly that in a few years we'd have commercial rocket transit that'd make the trip only take an hour. He was skeptical we'd see it happen in our lifetimes, so I suggested some reference class forecasting to aid our debate. He asked "How did people cross the Atlantic before commercial airlines?" "Zeppelins of course." He thought there was no way an airship could make the journey, but we looked it up and it did happen! We also learned that the end of the airship era was triggered by the Hindenberg disaster, but the knife was twisted by improvements in airplane tech, which allowed the same distance to be covered far faster. I argue that this speed boost is the same thing that'll drive adoption of rocket transit, first by the very wealthy, and then increasingly everyone as the technology becomes more efficient. From a physics perspective, it may even take less energy for long trips to go above the atmosphere and travel most of the distance in vacuum rather than battling air resistance for a thousand miles. Maybe it'll be cheaper than long flights too! By the end of the conversation he was convinced it might happen soon.
Cheese making
We binged YouTube videos to understand how cheeses differentiate from one another. It seems all cheese starts by curdling milk with eg rennet so the solids precipitate. Add a little milk back and you get cottage cheese. Grind it up: cream cheese. Heat it while grinding and mixing: mozzarella. Add in some peppers: pepperjack. Ferment: most of the other cheese types. The longer the ferment, the harder the cheese, due to water loss. Sharp cheddar is young extra sharp cheddar.
Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean 1, std .5
Highs: weight returning to normal, climbed a V5, work projects coming to fruition
Lows: procrastinating cleaning my CPAP
Life updates
🚀 Published first paper at Anthropic!
🦃 Parents + sister visited for Thanksgiving
🚴♂️ Bought a new road bike on curated.com
✨ Started reading Perhaps the Stars
🏕 Went camping with Diana and Roong-ji @ Big Sur
💉 COVID booster
🔧 Changed Diana's headlights ourselves
🤿 New CPAP mask h/t Jackson
🎸 Bonus
Content
5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted
What does it look like to make cinnamon? You cut a branch off a cinnamon tree, use a knife to scrape off the outer layer of bark, then cut the inner layer of bark off. That inner layer is immediately edible as fresh cinnamon, but usually it's then dried out into the brown cinnamon sticks you can buy in the store, and from there possibly ground up. 90% of the world's cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka, but this dude seemed to be in Florida.
Tactics of Physical Pen Testers 4/5
A penetration testing expert says lock picking is the 9th thing he'll try; this talk covers ~1-8.
Often you need a very simple, compact tool, but you need something. Sometimes it's a wire, sometimes it's a universal key, sometimes it's just spitting some vodka to fool an IR sensor.
Contractors who install security systems aren't incentivized to make things secure, but rather to not impede normal function. This leads to trivial exploits.
Dirty Harry 3/5
Clint Eastwood plays a cop who's committed to serving justice, rather than letting the law get in his way. The bad guy "just likes hurting people," so of course letting him go without a life in prison sentence would be a mistake, even without evidence. I'd guess a remake would try to make the bad guy a little sympathetic. Raises interesting philosophical question about what justice means, and how much we can trust people to carry it out faithfully and effectively.
Bonus: getting a feel for what SF was like in 1971. A lot of the architecture is familiar, since that's around when they enacted many of the NIMBY laws that make it hard to build new things.
Free Guy 3/5
Despite a fairly standard premise (Groundhog Day + AI "wakes up"), manages to be fresh and interesting. Ryan Reynolds is his usual self-aware charming innocent dude who loves coffee, ice cream, and the female lead.
The characters are fairly flat, the story is predictable, but the writing and personalities sufficiently earnest to make up for it.
I had abandoned the Terra Ignota series after a disappointingly plot-driven book two. I'm glad I gave it another shot with this third book.
Ada Palmer returns to the world building I loved from the first book, once more fleshing out the conflicts that can arise in a world of abundance when humanity's differing ideas of utopia clash.
The ending is a big cliffhanger pointing at the fourth book, Perhaps the Stars.
The high school edition of American Kingpin, but instead he was constantly caught and only served 3 years for making fake IDs and selling Xanax. Fascinating to hear how you can do pretty much everything wrong (get arrested over and over, ruin all your friends' lives, skip all your court dates, break tons of laws just for fun) and still get your life back afterwards.
Note to self: if I ever commit a crime, get a proffer agreement
Just Friends 3/5
Early Ryan Reynolds romcom about a fat kid who believes being the nice guy ruined his high school romance, and over-corrected as an adult. He has to make a bunch of mistakes to realize that being himself and being nice are actually the right things to do, and in fact it was his poor communication skills that ruined his earlier attempts.
While often cringe-y and dated, the leads managed to be sufficiently charming and funny that I enjoyed this movie.
The Drug King 2/5
Well done, but painful to watch: the rise and flaming fall of a South Korean meth kingpin. He starts out smuggling gold, then puts together a meth synthesis business, then starts using it himself and destroying every relationship in his life.
No Time to Die 2/5
Cookie-cutter bond film. Excellent chase and fight scenes, if rather nonsensical. Example: using your special watch to generate an EMP strong enough to fry the bionic eyeball of one of the stronger villains.
This time tried to be more woke, but it felt forced. Example: young black female 007 replacements decides that actually old white male is a better 007 than she, and she returns the title to him.
Red Notice 2/5
Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds are the buddy cops to Gal Godot's super con-artist. I kept asking myself if they had really made such a predictable and cookie-cutter film about stealing art, and in the end the answer was yes. I guess if you want to make a blockbuster with maximally broad appeal, you don't want to do anything new.
