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... everything is toxic in big amounts. Greenhouse gas is toxic in the amounts we use. More deadly then any poison that has ever been used.
It has been proven that everything is a poison, including oxygen! the air we breathe is responsible for our aging. In some ways we "rust" (we oxidize all the time) by breathing. I guess this means that if we didn't breathe, we wouldn't age... we would just die of asphyxia...
Also (though this may be slightly off-subject), anything is also a cure for something. In small amounts, something is a cure. In larger amounts, it's a poison.
Global Warming is going to happen, we can't stop it we can just try to slow it down. It probably wont happen for anougther 1000 years at least.
At the rate we're spiralling downwards, we'll hit our next ice age in the next 80 years or so.
This is REALLY scary to think about deeply, so I advise that you don't.
I'm NOT kidding about this -- The current CO2 levels in the atmosphere are WAY higher than they've ever been since the last time the ice caps melted.
Of course they were. These are just a little more "sideways"...
Here's an interesting "statistic" (if you can really call it that): If you look at a graph of the CO2 levels over the last several million years, you get something like this:
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______/\ /\________/\ /\_________/\ /\________/\ /\________________/
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The little "blips" are the ice ages and subsequent warm-ups before and after. The large climb at the end of the graph has happened over the last hundred years or less!!!
Yeah. If you asked someone to, for example, stop driving their car completely for the rest of their life, they probably couldn't do it (there are a few exceptions). If you made someone completely change the way they live, without electricity, without running water, without paper, etc., VERY few would be able to do it (save those who already live pretty much this way).
It's actually the one I was expecting.
(Here's an interesting way of thinking: nothing is impossible, it's just improbable.)
This entire system was discovered by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman.
Here's the relatively easy to understand math behind RSA public key encryption.
1. Find P and Q, two large (e.g., 1024-bit) prime numbers.
2. Choose E such that E is greater than 1, E is less than PQ, and E and (P-1)(Q-1) are relatively prime, which means they have no prime factors in common. E does not have to be prime, but it must be odd. (P-1)(Q-1) can't be prime because it's an even number.
3. Compute D such that (DE - 1) is evenly divisible by (P-1)(Q-1). This can also be written as DE = 1 (mod (P-1)(Q-1)), and D is called the multiplicative inverse of E. This is easy to do -- simply find an integer X which causes D = (X(P-1)(Q-1) + 1)/E to be an integer, then use that value of D.
4. The encryption function is C = (T^E) mod PQ, where C is the ciphertext (a positive integer), T is the plaintext (a positive integer), and ^ indicates exponentiation. The message being encrypted, T, must be less than the modulus, PQ.
5. The decryption function is T = (C^D) mod PQ, where C is the ciphertext (a positive integer), T is the plaintext (a positive integer), and ^ indicates exponentiation.
Your public key is the pair (PQ, E). Your private key is the number D (reveal it to no one). The product PQ is the modulus (often called N in the literature). E is the public exponent. D is the secret exponent.
Public/Private Key cyphers are generally hard to explain, but they usually involve:
-- HUGE random prime numbers
-- raising the message to the power of the public key, which is the product of the two HUGE primes.
-- sending: (message above raised) mod (a second part of the public key)
The private key is such that it can only be found using the two primes and that raising the encrypted message to the private key's power mod second part of public key gives you the message back.
Even the sender (and encrypter) of the message cannot decrypt it!
Don't worry!
1 a Move just one match to correct this equation:
VI=II
XI=11
b Again, this time differently:
VI=II
VT=I
c Another one to correct:
II=XXIII/VIII
IT=XXIII/VII
2 Using just one line, correct these:
a 4+4+4+44=492
4+444+44=492
b 10 10 10 = 9.50
10 TO 10 = 9.50
I really wish I were going to classes somewhere else... The classes here are REALLY boring for me. The upside of this is that I both have lots of time on my hands to teach myself stuff (chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.) and I get really good grades.
Still, having boring classes is, well, boring.
3 Using the all digits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 once and only once, form two whole numbers, one of which is the double of the other.
4 A farmer sells ten tons of potatoes every year and also grows seed for the next year's planting. If his yield is exactly twenty time the amount that he plants, then what is the least he needs to plant to ensure a perpetual supply?
5 A and B play a game as follows: A picks a whole number between 1 and 10. Then, B adds a number of his choice from 1 to 10 to A's number. The two play alternatively, the first person to reach exactly 100 is the winner. How can you be sure to win (assuming the other person doesn't know this method)?
6 A bath fills in 3 minutes with both taps on and the pug in. It takes 5 minutes to empty with both taps off and the plug out. How long will it take to fill the bath with both taps on and the plug out?
7 How many different ways can you make exactly 1000 using exactly 8 8s and no other digits and the usual operations of arithmetic?
Interesting thought processes...
If you want the official answers, send me a request at John89Murray@gmail.com
I find all of the answers so far quite... lateral
Chapter Two: Make mine math
1 a Move just one match to correct this equation:
VI=II
b Again, this time differently:
VI=II
c Another one to correct:
II=XXIII/VIII
2 Using just one line, correct these:
a 4+4+4+44=492
b 10 10 10 = 9.50
More later... I gotta go now.
I'll let you people think some more there... The next chapter's on its way...
Another way to do this process is to associate each character with a number (in ASCII, A=65, B=66, C=67, a=97, b=98, c=99...). Now you take the two numbers, corresponding to the first character of the message (m) and the first character of the key (k), and do the following: (k+m)mod 255 (for ASCII).
To decrypt this, the process is a bit more complicated to explain, but you basically do the opposite operation.
Now for the promised explanation of a polyalphabetic cypher:
You need: a piece of graph paper, a message and a key that is the same length as the message.
First, make a table that is 26 * 26 big. now, fill it in, starting at the upper left corner with A, and going across and downwards with the alphabet. You should now have 1 column and 1 row filled in. Now fill in the rest of the table so that each row and column has the entire alphabet in it, such that, for example, row 1 starts with "A" and ends with "Z", row 2 starts with "B" and ends with "A", row 3 starts with "C" and ends with "B", etc.
In case you don't get this, you can ask for more details
Now that you have your table, you can start to encrypt. Take the first letter of the message, and find the row that starts with this letter. Now take the first letter of your key, and find the column that starts with it. Find the point where these lines cross, and write the letter that is there. Now do this for the other letters.
There is another form of cypher which is completely different from a onetime pad (a symmetrical cypher, in which the key used to encrypt is the same as the one used to decrypt). This type of cypher is known as a public/private key cypher. The idea is that the key that is used to encrypt a message is different from the one used to decrypt it, and the latter CANNOT be deduced from the former. The encryption key is PUBLIC: it can be accessed by anyone. The decryption key is PRIVATE: it never, ever has to change hands.
My idea is that if you encrypt your message using a onetime pad, then string the key along to the end of the encrypted message, then send this whole string encrypted again with a public/private key cypher, the resulting cypher will be perfectly unbreakable: the onetime-pad-encrypted message followed by the key (which is always the exact same length as the message) is just as random as said key.
Therefore, when you encrypt the randomness with a normally breakable cypher that doesn't need to have its key transferred from sender to receiver, there shouldn't be any way of finding out whether what you decrypt is the right thing or not.
It is "common knowledge" among cryptographers that there is no such thing as a perfectly unbreakable cypher. However, I believe that this is not entirely true...
A onetime pad cypher is a polyalphabetic substitution cypher (for those who don't know what this is, I'll explain later). The key in a onetime pad is RANDOM (or as random as you can get). This is the basis of the system. This cypher is known to be unbreakable, because of the following:
The person intercepting the coded message does not know the key, so the best way for them to find out the message is to draw up a table of all the possible combinations of keys/messages that would give you the message that the person intercepted. Normally, the actual message would be easy to find, because the message and key would make sense (for longer messages, there would be 3 or 4 possibilities). However, since the key is RANDOM, the person cannot have any way of knowing which sensible message is the right one (for longer messages, there can be 70 or 80 possibilities, since the number of combinations of characters is, with ASCII, length of message^255).
Unfortunately, the trouble with this is getting the key to the recipient without being intercepted. This is where my idea comes in...
My year has been rather boring, my dad having taught me most of the stuff we covered when I was 4 (electronics, math, needless to say, English, and a few others).
Over here, the grading system is pretty different: each test is scored as x/20, and then they do an average for each subject at the end of each trimester, then an average of those averages. Then, at the end of the year (unfortunately, usually around the 8th of July), they do an average of each subject over the entire year, then an average of those averages.
Besides the strange notation system, and the language, I've had it pretty easy this year. I'm expecting my overall average to be somewhere around 17/20 (believe me, it is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to get an overall average of 20/20).
This summer, I'm flying back home (the US) for a while. I intend to get some items that I need over here but can't find (video games, a new computer...).
That much, eh? That's more than can be said for most people around today.
(No offense intended towards any people in particular)
Actually, I have heard that we're overdue for our ice age by about 1000 years!
The actual number is probably less than this, but we're still overdue.
Actually, there is a problem with this: there is no distinction between the inside and the outside... The same problem as a coffee cup, or any other recipient.
The shape is still really neat though.