It may be a trite saying, but it's as true in education as it is in a gym. If you don't exercise your brain, it's not going to improve.

There's a reason weightlifters don't use a forklift or crane to pick up the barbells and do a dozen reps. The problem is not that the weights are in need of lifting. And that's the same problem with homework. The teacher doesn't need a stack of 5 page reports; what they need is for their students to practice using their brains.

Unfortunately the education system is designed to evaluate output instead of process. It's easier to grade a paper or a test, not evaluate a demonstration of knowledge. It's always been ripe for cheating, but now the cheat tools are everywhere and made legitimate by techbros demanding AI productivity. So either teaching will change, or we'll head straight for idiocracy and nobody will be left with the skills to wonder why it all went to hell.

I had signed up for a webinar for this morning.

When I tried to connect, it wouldn't let me. It said that you either had to use Chrome or Edge. On the computer I was on, I only had Firefox and Opera installed.

So no webinar.

Kissinger was instrumental in starting the Vietnam War?

Where did you get that idea?

At the time of the start of the Vietnam War, Kissinger earning his doctorate. It is hard to imagine someone starting a war overseas while they are a grad student. That would be one hell of a powerful graduate student.

A more technological society would likely be impossible with few people. If there were only ten million people, we wouldn't have the infrastructure we would need to be able to progress much at all. More likely, it would knock us back a thousand years or more. Our automation would be minimal.

Like it or not, the people of today live better than kings did 500 years go.

A warmer Earth is a more productive Earth.

The real disaster would be a cooling Earth. When this interglacial period ends and we start to enter into another 100,000+ years of serious cold, with temperature drops well in excess of 10 F starvation is going to become real common. Death by starvation might easily be the number one cause of death at that time.

There will also likely be world wars over the dwindling resources of the Earth. They might even have the potential to replace death by starvation to become the leading cause of death.

I'll take warmer and love it.

My local church uses Zelle for donations. You can attend on-line through their Facebook page and then make your donation with Zelle.

That is literally the only time I have personally come across it being used, but then I don't get out very often.

I used to know a lawyer who war sunglasses at night. I'd laugh every time I saw him.

That was one of the least intelligent lawyers I ever met. When I knew him, he hadn't been able to pass the bar exam. I looked him up on the Internet about a year ago and it appears that he never did manage to pass it.

A few years ago, I sunburned the hell out of my eyes twice.

On one July afternoon, I was on the roof of our office building in the middle of the day and got a hell of a sunburn of the eyes. Then about three weeks later in August, I was on the roof of our city hall in the middle of the day and got another sunburn of the eyes, nearly as bad as the first. On both occasions, I was wearing a cap. It clearly provided no help.

The following July 3rd, I got a light sunburn outside in the middle of the day while wearing a cap. So on the 5th of July, I drove to a farm/ranch store in a nearby small city and bought a straw western hat for the summer. I also started wearing a beaver felt western hat that had been my father's in the fall, winter, and early spring. Also, unlike the current fashion for western hats, I flatten the brim out to provide better protection from the sun on the sides.

I haven't had any issues since.

Regarding buying advertised products, I grew up on a somewhat remote farm/ranch. Also, we didn't have that much spending money. When I was a kid, I would watch advertisements on tv and wonder what it was like to use this or that product or eat at this or that restaurant. But I never did have the chance since they were for places that were generally 100 miles away or more.

Over time, I just started tuning out the advertisements. They now have little or no effect on me.

For example, I never even saw a McDonald's until I went to college in the early 1970s. After a year or so, I did stop and eat at one and saw no reason to go back. Since that first time, I've eaten at McDonald's exactly twice. Similarly, I've eaten at Burger King once that I can remember and thought their food was really awful.

There is some brand awareness, but I generally don't choose on brand. For example, when I go to the store for toothpaste, I can't remember what brand I've been using, so I just get whatever is cheaper. There are no chain restaurants in my hometown (the one nearest the farm/ranch) and only two chain restaurants in the county. Neither of those are on my list of places to eat.

Not only am I not much of a consumer, but advertising does little to sway me.

If I need a product, I may or may not think back to advertisements for that product. What does not happen is for advertisements to drive my desire t buy a product. The only times that brand matters to me is if I have tried the brand and were happy with it or if that brand is the most most available out here on the prairie.

I have been able to "smarten" dumb appliances by plugging them into smart power switches. For less than $8 each I bought a couple boxes of smart switches from Amazon, then reflashed them with Tasmota -- no more cloud! -- and joined them to Home Assistant. Now any device I want to be smart, I plug it into a smart switch and monitor the power.

One of my scripts monitors the power draw on my dryer, and when it goes above 100W for a minute then drops below 10W for 15 seconds, it knows the cycle is done and alerts us to go down to the basement and take out the clothes before they wrinkle. A similar script monitors the washer.

The refrigerator's plug has a script alert me when the average daily power draw is higher than normal. I added that after my son called me from his most recent vacation and said "my refrigerator is using more power than it should, can you go check it?" Sure enough, their freezer door had been left open by their toddler. Of course the food was already thawing, but we cleaned it out a week before they would have come home to a house full of rotted food stench. And before you ask, yes, when I installed Tasmota I configured the switch to be "always on", so that even if Home Assistant thinks it would be a good idea to shut off the refrigerator's power, it can't.

I also have a small water pump on a smart switch. Normally the pump draws 36W, but when it runs dry it draws 30W. Now if the power consumption drops below 33W and stays there for a few minutes, it shuts off the pump and alerts me that the water is low.

So I get what I need -- timely information about the equipment in my home, automated reactions when things go bad that might keep things from getting worse, and no cloud involvement from any sleazy appliance manufacturers. And an $8 plug is a lot cheaper than paying a $400 premium for a "smart washer".

Tuya's become a nightmare to deal with. They've decided they fear local integrations because they're losing ad revenue when people don't use the Tuya app. They have been going to progressively greater lengths to prevent device buyers from bypassing the Tuya servers and running their stuff locally.

My understanding is you can no longer register for a free Tuya developer account that lets you set it up with the "Local Tuya" integration for HomeAssistant -- you have to have a paid developer account, if it works at all. And their libraries used to flash right onto an ESP32, but now they're encouraging developers to more secure chips, in an attempt to prevent end users from reflashing their own devices with firmware (like Tasmota) that no longer communicates via Tuya services.

I wouldn't buy anything Tuya with the hopes that it will someday integrate with anything else. If you buy them, expect them only to work with the official apps.

PKIs were designed for offline use. There are a couple hundred trusted Certificate Authorities that each issue a "root" certificate. These root certificates are distributed worldwide, in browsers, operating system distros, phones, etc. When you encounter a certificate in the wild, you have to verify the certificate before accepting it, which is done by checking what you can locally: is it expired? Does its DNS name resolve to the name on the cert? Does it have a valid signature? This means checking to see if it was signed by a CA certificate that you already have in your local trust store; if so, you can accept it without going online.

Not to say that the online component of certificate validation isn't important, but it's of varying importance depending on the risk level. When online you should check for certificate revocation, which is to check to see if a previously issued certificate has since been flagged by the CA as compromised and revoked. This can be done by looking for it on a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) published by the signing authority, or by querying the authority's Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server. But it's an optional step, and can be skipped in low-risk situations (such as being offline.)

Our civilization was not possible until the Earth warmed up, warmer than today, roughly 10,000 years ago.

We are in an ice age right now. It is a inter-glacial warm period, but still an ice age. Whenever this period ends and it cools back down, that is when the true disaster will emerge as the carrying capacity will rapidly fall and mankind will be fighting what is left. Starvation will become extremely common.

The period known as the The Little Ice Age had major effects but nothing compared to what entering another period of glaciation will bring.

About 10,000 or so years ago, the Earth had warmed up enough for mankind to begin settling down in agricultural communities instead of consisting in small bands of subsistence hunters. Our distant ancestors were finally able to take some control over their lives instead of just moving from place to place looking for prey.

Coupled with this was the accidental development of the modern hexaploid wheat during the same rough time period. Before that, we only had diploid and tetraploid wheat. Some unknown farmer sowing his ancient crop of wheat accidentally included a related grass. By horizontal gene transfer, the genes from the related grass entered that tetraploid wheat and voila, it has 42 chromosomes instead of the previous 28 chromosomes. This new wheat quickly spread across Europe and Asia and eventually around the world. The tetraploid wheats are still important today for things like pasta, but the wheat that enabled civilization to flourish like never before was the hexaploid wheat that was successfully grown around the world.

Prior to our current interglacial warm period, sea levels were about 100 meters lower than now. Just a few thousand years ago, they were about two meters higher than today because of the warmer temperatures of that time.

If you want to see the probable end of our civilization, cool it back down. That can happen pretty quickly, too. There is some thought that when we entered the cool period known as The Younger Dryas, we dropped about 10 degrees Centigrade over a few years. The knowledge that this will almost certainly happen again along with the uncertain knowledge of when it will happen is what is truly scary.

For my e-mail, I have both RSA4096 and ED25519 PGP keys that are published on keys.openpgp.org. One thing that bothers me, though, is that for every '+' style alias, we need a different key. For example, 123456@example.com and 123456+ 3.14159265358979323846264338@example.com need different keys. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it were not for the fact that I use the '+' aliases extensively in order to make it easier to filter my e-mail into the proper folder on arrival. While few people send me encrypted e-mail, I generally have to have PGP keys for them in case they start using PGP to encrypt e-mail.

Same here. As for 4096 bit RSA vs 8192 bit or 16384 bit RSA, I don't think that there is much practical difference. Just avoid 2048 bit RSA and you should be fine.