This World and Me

Back in August 2018, I wrote a post called " Secret messages ". In that post, I discussed how in elementary school my friends and I devised a rudimentary "secret language" to send coded messages to each other without our enemies knowing what we were writing. I then discussed a little bit of modern cryptography (which I described as "the scientific study of sending secret messages"), specifically the RSA encryption scheme . This post is a bit of a follow-up to that post. With today's technology, it is quite easy to send someone a secret message that not only can be read only by the intended recipient, but also allows the intended recipient to verify that the message was not modified by an eavesdropper or "man-in-the-middle". It happens everyday on the Internet: see the part of this blog's URL that says " https ". That 's' there is extremely important. It means that you can trust that this blog post was delivered to you by...

I have a pet peeve that comes up when I talk with someone about a song, a film, a TV show, or perhaps a book. Occasionally, one of my friends will describe such a work as objectively good or objectively bad . These phrases will always cause me to raise an eyebrow. What exactly are the objective factors that determine the quality of a creative work? I can think of a few ideas, but each seem problematic. My first thought is numbers. We could sample from a group of people who have experienced a particular work and ask them whether they think the work is "good". If a supermajority says yes, then the work is objectively good ; if a supermajority says no, then the work is objectively bad ; if there is no clear answer, then the work is objectively neither good nor bad . This method is questionable because it seems to rely heavily on mere popularity. To use an adage that one of my high school English teachers had on her little podium: "What is popular is not always right, and ...