In the U.S. we have belatedly had declassification of various parts of military history, including lots of details about Los Alamos (where the U.S. atom bomb was invented). Sometimes this has happened on a delay of many decades and there are certainly still some things that the public might think of as part of "history" that are not officially declassified. Has there been a similar process in China where older military history is no longer officially secret?
There are a lot of subtleties about connotation here. I would say that "storytelling" traditionally primarily meant fiction, but some modern uses also include narrative technique generally, including nonfiction and also marketing. There may also be older traditions of nonfiction storytelling, but that has some connotation of a ritualized or formalized activity (e.g. children sitting in a circle listening to a recitation).
The term that has no connotations of fiction is probably "narrative".
I think many languages have closely related words for fictional narratives and nonfictional narratives.
I don't think that's true. Perhaps in your dialect of English, but if I was down the pub and someone started with, "Did I ever tell you the story of when I...", I certainly wouldn't assume it was fictional.
I think "tell you the story of" has a different connotation from "storytelling"!
E.g. if you said someone was good at "storytelling" as a skill, then I would expect it to be most likely fictional. I agree that "tell you the story of..." could easily be nonfictional.
I remember in 3rd or 4th grade I felt sure I knew how to read a clock (then usually analog) until the teacher started a formal classroom unit to teach us. I realized that I had only understood how to read the hour hand but not the minute or second hands. Illusion of competence or illusion of depth or something.
This use in dialogue is common in Continental European languages, especially Romance languages. I think it's also common in English among writers who were influenced by other European languages?
There have been some asynchronous secure messenger projects in the past (Pond and Secure Scuttlebutt come to mind). High latency is really important for defeating traffic analysis, but people are so unaccustomed to it now because of all the engineering work that's gone into successfully reducing the latency of almost all of our communication systems. Accepting high-latency messaging as a defense against traffic analysis might involve psychology even more than engineering: cultivating patience.
Latency stops being a technical parameter and becomes a side effect of interaction. What matters is not delivery speed, but how meaning accumulates over time.
There’s no single “correct” latency. It’s not a fixed parameter but a variable tied to the threat model and the economics of surveillance.
For low-risk, everyday coordination, minutes might be sufficient. For high-value intelligence, latency needs to be long enough to break the temporal correlation between input and outcome.
If monitoring a 24-hour window costs an adversary $X, the goal is to stretch the window until the cost of semantic inference exceeds the value of the information being inferred. Beyond that point, surveillance becomes economically irrational.
In that sense, latency functions like a currency: users “spend” time to buy lower observability. How much they’re willing to spend depends entirely on what they’re protecting and from whom.
I wonder what you could usefully do with a Kensington lock on the train. I bought one for use in cafés although I haven't used it most of the time.
You could attach it to something bulkier or something that you could put under the seat, maybe. I don't remember if New York subway seats have an exposed bar underneath that you could lock it to. I'm sure locking it to the vertical poles in the center of the car would be extremely antisocial.
Wear it like a belt while attaching it to the laptop (If you don't mind looking a bit ridiculous).
Although I'd highly recommend putting some cloth around it, or fitting it through the belt loops of jeans/trousers to soften the inevitable 'yank' when it comes.
Just my opinion, but I feel Kensington locks have little value.
Sure, maybe it will deface the stolen item when it gets ripped off, but for a thief, the device is still usable, and it can be sold for parts or at a discount. We are talking about the sorts of people that steal bicycle wheels and seats.
Their utility is in keeping honest people honest. For example, keeping office workers or customers from just walking off with or moving assets.
Here we're literally talking about protecting the device while the user is actively using it! Just preventing someone from grabbing it by hand for 5 seconds is a huge win.
The lock and lock attachment are supposedly rated for several hundred pounds of force. There are probably people who can break it by hand (especially if they practice applying the force at just the right angle or something) but a casual "grab and run" is not going to do it.
I met a top-tier actor once in 2014 because he was working on something non-Hollywood-related with a friend of mine. Out of curiosity, I looked at his Twitter feed to see if he had anything to say publicly about that project.
It was insane. It was full of people randomly asking to meet up with him in tons of different cities, people asking him to review their movie scripts/theatrical projects, people asking him for money, and women either offering to have sex with him or asking him to marry them. All in public, and just day after day like that.
reply