Misc on Chase the Devil

Covid-19 Fake News

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 07:56:42 +0100

One thing that motivated me for vaccination is the fake news propaganda against the Covid-19 vaccines.

A mild example relates to the data from Israel about the delta variant. This kind of article, with the title “Covid 19 Case Data in Israel, a Troubling Trend”, puts emphasis on the doubts on the effectivness of the vaccine:

the vaccine appears to have a negligible effect on an individual as to whether he/she catches the current strain. Moreover, the data indicates that the current vaccines used (Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca) may have a decreasing effect on reduced hospitalizations and death if one does get infected with the Delta variant.

Are traditional banks ready for the 21st century?

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 07:56:42 +0100

This is a follow up on my parents phishing scam.

After several weeks, my parents and I were finally able to have a real world meeting with the advisor at the bank. The advisor is a young woman with an obvious background in sales.

In order to process the paperwork around the reimbursement of the phishing scam, the main issue was the request of the original phishing e-mail by the bank, as my mother had deleted the e-mail. It turns out, that in Thunderbird, deleted e-mails are not deleted on disk until an operation of compactification of the mailbox is done. I was thus able to recover the deleted e-mail. Interestingly, the deleted e-mail was not in the trash file, but directly in the inbox file.

Yesterday, Pirates Took Over My Parents Bank Account

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 07:56:42 +0100

This is the story of their hack.

Yesterday evening, I received a call from my mother, frantic over the phone. She says she sees alerts of withdrawals from her bank account on her phone, with new alerts every 5 minutes or so. I try to ask her if she clicked recently on some e-mail related to her bank. She is so panicked that I don’t manage to have an answer. While trying to understand if those alerts are real or not, my wife suggests immediately that my mother should call her bank. On the phone, I ask

Benham disc in web canvas

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 23:56:42 +0100

Around 15 years ago, I wrote a small Java applet to try and show the Benham disk effect. Even back then applets were already passé and Flash would have been more appropriate. These days, no browser support Java applets anymore, and very few web users have Java installed. Flash also mostly disappeared. The web canvas is today’s standard allowing to embbed animations in a web page. This effect shows color perception from a succession of black and white pictures. It is a computer reproduction from the Benham disc with ideas borrowed from "Pour La Science Avril/Juin 2003". Using a delay between 40 and 60ms, the inner circle should appear red, the one in the middle blue and the outer one green. When you reverse the rotation direction, blue and red circles should be inverted.

Is Tufte overrated?

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 16:11:30 +0100

Tufte proposes interesting guidelines to present data, or even to design written semi-scientific papers or books. Some advices are particularly relevant like the careful use of colors (don’t use all the colors of the rainbow just because you can), and in general don’t add lines in a graph or designs that are not directly relevant to the message that needs to be conveyed. There is also a parallel with Feynman message against (Nasa) Powerpoint presentations. But other inspirations, are somewhat doubtful. He seems to have a fetish for old texts. They might be considered pretty, or interesting in some ways, but I don’t find them particularly easy to read. They look more like esoteric books rather than practical books. If you want to write the new Bible for your new cult, it’s probably great, not so sure it’s so great for a more simple subject. Also somewhat surprisingly, his own website is not very well designed, it looks like a maze and very end of 90s.

Moved to hugo

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 21:00:57 +0100

I moved my blog from blogger to Hugo. Blogger really did not evolve since Google take-over in 2003. Wordpress is today much nicer and prettier. It’s clear that Google did not invest at all, possibly because blogs are passé. Compared to mid 2000, there are very few blogs today. Even programming blogs are scarce. It could be interesting to quantify this. My theory is that it is the direct consequence of the popularity of social networks, and especially facebook (possibly also stackoverflow for programmers): people don’t have time anymore to write as their extra-time is used on social networks. Similarly I noticed that almost nobody comments anymore to the point that even Disqus is very rarely used, and again I attribute that to the popularity of sites like reddit. This is why I did not bother with a comment section on my blog, just email me or tweet about it instead.