Steganography

Steganography is one of the words my husband tossed to me in one of our frequent blog idea discussions. Unlike him I did not immediately expose my lack of knowledge about this term by asking “Huh?” or in any way admitting that I didn’t know or had never heard of it. I guessed it was something about handwriting analysis or dinosaurs but jotted it down for further investigation either way. Although steganography has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks it isn’t as old as the dinosaurs and has nothing to do with stegosaurs, my apologies to any paleontologists reading this blog. It was not my intention to mislead. I also got to thinking that other than at school or in attaching signatures, not that much handwriting is going on these days (at least in my case). Even signatures can be digital and the majority of my pen in hand time is when I am making lists, mostly I keyboard on this computer. Handwriting analysis does include and rely heavily on a handwritten signature though but steganography isn’t that either.

Steganography defined is the science of hiding information. Secret messages are hidden in physical objects and known only to the sender and intended receiver. It is considered the dark cousin of cryptology.  Though on the surface these two terms seem similar, the purpose of cryptology is privacy and the purpose of steganography is secrecy. With computers it’s possible to create hidden messages that are even less noticeable and require software programs to reveal them. Today steganography is used in combination with cryptology to supplement encryption. An encrypted file may still hide information using steganography, so even if the encrypted file is deciphered, the hidden message can remain unseen.

In case you were wondering, there is no steganography (hidden message) in this blog post even though it would be really cool if there was. I have enough problems finding things in plain sight, like an unopened container of grated parmesan on the shelf before my eyes in my own pantry. 

Horsemeat for Human Consumption

I've been thinking about this topic for a while because I am conflicted about it. As a child I clearly remember seeing horsemeat in the meat cases at the A&P (grocery store). And a while back I blogged about the special connection horses have been known to make with autistic kids and the use of horses in a therapeutic setting. My own experience riding a horse is limited to a single event as a teen riding through a truck patch, stealing green tomatoes, outside Chicago and is probably best saved for another blog. Suffice to say when a police car cruised through a vacant neighboring subdivision (still under construction), the horse identified my panic and got me safely away. The evidence (purloined green tomatoes) was fried up nicely and disappeared but in the heat of the escape (I don’t think the cop ever saw us) my shoe disappeared too. That’s the short version of my limited horseback riding adventure.

Back to the horsemeat for human consumption issue, restrictions on slaughtering horses and processing them for human consumption were lifted in 2011.  So even though it’s legal to slaughter and process horsemeat, I can still think of plenty of reasons not to eat horsemeat. There are not restrictions on the drugs given to horses to enhance their performance (in racing or pulling carriages) or ease their arthritis and these chemicals stay in their flesh and can be poisonous to us if we eat it. What if Mad Horse disease accompanies the consumption of horsemeat like Mad Cow is related to eating beef? How humane is it to kill and eat companion animals? I have chickens (with names) that I couldn't kill for food (but I still eat chicken). In other countries people eat insects and other animals that I wouldn't and in this country we eat animals (pork comes to mind) that other cultures find taboo.

On the plus side eating rare (uncooked) horsemeat is supposedly healthier than eating beef prepared rare. Horsemeat is supposedly sweeter than beef. I guess I am using supposedly in my writing as an indicator (to me and you) that eating horsemeat is something I have no intention of doing. I already avoid red meat, and after thinking about my chickens and writing this post I am seriously considering going combat vegetarian with my grandson, Jonas!   

Kudos for Crooked River State Park

Crooked River State Park (at the end of Spur 40 AKA Charlie Smith Sr. Hwy beyond and beside the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base) received the GA Department of Natural Resources most outstanding park operation award. The regional manager for the GA State Parks and Historic Sites in region 2 says, “Crooked River is a park that does all things well.” On that I must agree. They manage and maintain the grounds, save money by doing things that might be done by outside contractors in other parks, and keep and maintain equipment that is shared among other parks in the area. They assist local law enforcement in training and search and rescue operations.

In previous blog posts I have mentioned the park’s miniature golf course and gopher tortoises. Crooked River State Park also plays an important role in the setting in my book, Play on Words, and again in the setting of another project I have in the works.

The article in the Georgia Times Union mentions that Crooked River State Park is known for its nature center, bird blind, birding and other nature programs, and guided kayak trips but there is much more to enjoy there. The park has several trails, two favorites of mine are the Semper Virens and marsh trails. Hiking in through the woods deep into the canopy where you are surrounded by the sounds of nature, transports you away from civilization where and you can discover shell mounds of earlier native cultures and trees that have survived from those times to the present. Depending on the tide you can find fiddler and Dungeness crabs and an occasional fisherman sitting on a cooler along with a beautiful view of the marsh grasses and the wildlife that frequents the marsh and spy dolphins in the river and an occasional manatee. The camp grounds, cabins, and pavilions screened or open, and the playgrounds round out the experience with plenty of paved and unpaved places for bicycling too.

Crooked River State Park is also a partner in education to the public and the schools in our county. They organize and host educational experiences for visiting school groups on field trips through-out the year and take their expertise on the road to the schools bringing animals and artifacts out to the schools when asked.

So kudos to Crooked River State Park, another part of what makes St. Marys a great place, a quiet treasure well deserving of this award.

Provocateur Rodman, an Unlikely Ambassador

Last night I was bugging my husband for blog ideas again. What follows is an excerpt (that includes an idea) from our discussion on Skype last night.

[8:42 PM] A. Mount: You could write about Dennis Rodman's visit to North Korea. A more unlikely ambassador than him is not likely to be found. Guess he's trying to get peace talks to rebound and bring everyone back onto the court without either side fouling out before they get started. It was interesting that in the field of play, Kim asked Rodman to pass "the ball" to Obama since Obama likes basketball and told him to take "shot" at restarting the peace effort by giving him a call to talk about the round ball game.

[8:43 PM] Jo Mount: I agree about Rodman being an unlikely ambassador.

And I immediately rejected the idea of blogging about Dennis Rodman. I remembered seeing a woman trying to sell one of Rodman’s autographed jerseys on a pawn show on the history or one of those channels (before I ditched the dish) and when the guys asked her how she got it she said she was one of his exes. That got a laugh but I don’t remember if she made the sale or not.

Eventually my husband and I signed off from Skype for the night. I flipped on the TV and who did I see on Celebrity Apprentice (the All-Star version), none other than Dennis Rodman, defending another accused villain, Omarosa, rather calmly and rationally in verbal scuffle with Piers Morgan in the boardroom.

Third time charmed, I figured Rodman was worth a Google. I found out he spent two days in North Korea with the Harlem Globe Trotters. Apparently Kim, recent heir apparent of North Korean political prestige, is a basketball fan. There was also an exhibition game played with two Americans, each on opposite teams of North Koreans, and the game ended in a tie 110-110, interesting. The media and our own State Department has definitely painted Kim in more villainous shades than the reality show personality, Omarosa. In North Korea there are human rights issues and underground nuclear testing, among other things that are much more real than reality TV to consider.  But Rodman says that Kim is not his father or grandfather and held out the possibility of Kim and Obama sharing a love of basketball as “common ground.” For a moment I thought about how things might be different if politics was more idealistic like sports. That thought was countered by all the cheating and scandals trending in sports today. Maybe sports and politics are too alike.

And a more unlikely ambassador than Dennis Rodman is not likely to be found. 

The Buzz on Bees

I recently read about how, due recent episodes of colony collapse, bees, when they decide to set up shop in areas where they are seen as a nuisance, are being moved by beekeepers and environmentalists rather than removed by extermination. These attempts to save bee colonies are a bonus for the bees and the rest of us who either depend on them for pollination or have a sweet tooth for local honey (like me). The added bonus of ingesting local honey is the possibility of desensitizing oneself to some common allergies, specifically the pollen related ones. Bees collect 66 pounds of pollen each year per hive (that much less to invade my nasal passages!).

At the Saturday Community Market (9 AM to 1 PM downtown in front of the pavilion) in St. Marys this weekend was the first time this winter that I didn’t see Honest Dan the Honey Man (and his dwindling wares) downtown. I fortunately still have some of his locally produced golden sweetness and hope it lasts till his return to the market later this month because it is a staple for us on fresh warm biscuits most weekends. Dan is also my go to local expert when I have questions about bees. In St. Marys bees don’t produce honey all year round but they do eat honey all year to survive. In the winter the hive is quite inactive and bees cluster together for warmth maintaining a temp of 93 degrees Fahrenheit in the cluster’s center year round.

Here is a fact, recently unknown at least to me that I found out in my discussion with Dan; sometimes you have to feed your bees (especially if you've harvested a lot of their honey). How I came to find this out began with the behavior of bees in the Bahamas. On Andros, a place I enjoy frequenting, Cuban emeralds (iridescent green hummingbirds) and bananaquits (tiny blue and yellow bird acrobats) abound and visit numerous hummingbird feeders strung among the residences there. There’s even a hummingbird feeder hanging in the tree in front of my husband’s 711along with a seed feeder, wind chimes, etc. You might wonder what that has to do with bees, well shortly after a hurricane passed by last season the local bees kept in hives by some of the beekeepers in the neighborhood began visiting the hummingbird feeders too, much to the chagrin of some of the local bird watchers (and feeders). Apparently the high winds blew the blossoms (and subsequently the pollen) off the foliage on Andros forcing the bees to go looking for other sources of food. I also found out that bees like even the smallest blossoms (think clover and others I always thought of as weeds) and if the beekeepers on Andros had fed their bees they could have headed off the need for the bees to make a run on an alternative source of sweetness, the hummingbird feeders.

That’s my buzz for today on bees. 

Seeking Middle Aged Couple for trip to Mars

Private project would send middle-aged couple to Mars was the headline I read in the paper last month. I jotted it down on my blog idea list. I skimmed the article but and set it aside thinking it might be hard to come up with a perspective because I am past middle-age (and into old age). The idea sat there on the list and in the back of my mind percolating. So last night when I booted up my laptop I figured I’d go to Google and find out just what the age range for middle-age is. There I found in one definition I am just one year out of middle-age and in a couple others I am still middle-aged (albeit still close to the old age end). That’s when I decided to go dig through the recycling and find that article again. Maybe I could come up with a perspective on spending sixteen months in a confined space capsule with my husband after all.

Private project would send middle-aged couple to Mars, why not, I asked myself as I began to read. And here are some of the article’s salient points.

1.    .  The capsule is only half the size of an RV.

2.    .  There are no showers and limits on toilet paper and clothing.

3.      Drinking water is made from crew members’ recycled urine and sweat.

4.      There’s almost no privacy (but on the plus side author of the article mentions sex in zero gravity).

5.      The couple will need piloting skills and skills like McGyver to fix things on the fly.

6.      And last of all, the mission is at least five years away yet.

Upon reflection, I have come to the realization that this trip is probably not for me for almost all of the above reasons.

Then I asked my husband on Skype what he thought of the idea and what follows is part of our conversation (I’m leaving out the zero gravity sex stuff).

[9:09 PM] A Mount: You would have to put up with my crap.

[9:10 PM] Jo Mount: They didn't mention that. 16 months of nasty dumps.

[9:11 PM] A Mount: Remember the movie Joe Dirt? He carried a huge crystalized turd around in a wheel barrow that he though was a meteorite.

[9:12 PM] A Mount: We could be sending turds where no turds have gone before to explore new worlds and new civilizations and we'd be going where no one has gone before - near Mars. 

Thank goodness in five years we’ll be in the wrong age category, for sure. 

Palindromes

Today’s date in digits is a palindrome, 3-1-13, which simply means the digits 3113 read the same forward or backward (not as cool as the date in a sequence but the next coolest thing, to me). Any series of numbers can be reduced to a palindrome by taking the number (sequence of digits) and subtracting the same digits in reverse sequence. Continue repeating the reverse and subtract process and eventually you will end up with a numerical palindrome (or sequence of numbers that read the same backwards and forwards). I like to do it on this computer’s calculator, the easy way. But here is an example that is easy and only takes a single subtraction, 221. 221-122 (221digits in reverse) = 99 and 99 is a palindrome. Now (if you have time) try it with the year you were born. It takes one side of a piece of notebook paper to get a palindrome from mine (complete with regrouping or as I remember it being called borrowing) using the handwritten method (and human brain vs. the calculator).

Not a math person? Well words can also be palindromes like the name, Hannah or racecar and phrases can also be palindromic, just look on Google. Then there are songs that come very close to being palindromes. The song I heard way too often while traveling with kids is the one about the Hole in the Bucket, Dear Liza where Henry can’t fetch water for obvious reasons and in the end cannot repair the hole in the bucket because he cannot fetch water in it too. Cat’s in the Cradle is another song that tells a story that comes full circle.

Here are a couple of palindromes as my final words in this post…

Sex at noon taxes…So, Ida, adios!