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- The Creatures That Ate HollywoodToday
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: When a giant sperm whale rammed a whaling vessel in 1820, the deadly encounter inspired Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick.
Melville's story, inspired by real-life man-versus-beast mayhem from the 1800s, made it to movie screens in the 1950s. Director John Huston's Moby Dick was evidence of Hollywood's growing fascination with giant, thrashing creatures.
Here are some of the best beasties ever captured on celluloid.
Left:
Captain Ahab (played by Gregory Peck) battles the great white whale in Moby Dick.
: A giant squid battles Captain Nemo (played by James Mason) in Walt Disney's 1954 production, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
: Another great white terror of the deep surfaced in 1975's Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg. The blockbuster scared beachgoers and spawned three sequels.
- Nov. 20, 1820: One Whale Exacts His RevengeToday
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1820: The whaling ship Essex is rammed and sunk by a sperm whale 2,000 miles off the west coast of South America. The ordeal of the crew inspires Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick.
The Essex was an aging vessel from Nantucket, which at the time possessed the largest whaling fleet in the world. The three-masted ship was 87 feet long and weighed 238 tons. She was captained by George Pollard Jr., at 28 already an experienced whaler.
By November 1820 the Essex had been at sea for over a year (three years out was not uncommon), surviving an early knockdown in an Atlantic squall and a rough passage around Cape Horn. Once the ship reached the fertile Pacific whaling grounds, however, things began looking up.
If the risks of whaling were many, the rewards could be great. Whale oil was prized as a lighting fuel. A successful voyage could make a captain wealthy, and meant a good payday for the crew as well. The Essex had taken its share of whales and on Nov. 20 appeared ready to take a few more when a pod was sighted off the starboard beam.
The ship's three remaining whaleboats — one had been destroyed by a whale's flukes during an earlier hunt — were dispatched for the kill. As the harpooning began, First Mate Owen Chase, commandin
- America's Next Top Hash Function BeginsYesterday
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You might not have realized it, but the next great battle of cryptography began this month. It's not a political battle over export laws or key escrow or NSA eavesdropping, but an academic battle over who gets to be the creator of the next hash standard.
Hash functions are the most commonly used cryptographic primitive, and the most poorly understood. You can think of them as fingerprint functions: They take an arbitrary long data stream and return a fixed length, and effectively unique, string. The security comes from the fact that while it's easy to generate the fingerprint from a file, it's infeasible to go the other way and generate a file given a fingerprint.
Originally created to make digital signatures more efficient, hashes are now used to secure the very fundamentals of our information infrastructure: in password logins, secure web connections, encryption key management, virus and malware scanning, and almost every cryptographic protocol in current use. Without cryptographic hash functions, the internet would simply not work. At the same time, there isn't a good theory of hash functions. Unlike encryption algorithms, there are no secret keys involved; this makes it harder to mathematically define exactly what hash functions are.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions. "SHA" stands for
- Linux Guru Reiser Seeks New Murder TrialYesterday
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Hans Reiser, the 44-year-old Linux guru who was convicted in April of killing his wife, is seeking a new trial. But Reiser, who killed wife Nina Reiser, waived his right to appeal in exchange for his sentence to be reduced from 25-to-life to 15-to-life. The deal included leading authorities to the hills in Oakland, Calif., where he buried his 31-year-old wife who was divorcing him.
- Introducing the Threat Level Rewards ProgramYesterday
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The National Review Online is courting financial contributions by offering "new opportunities for access" to its editors and writers. Not to be outdone, here's the skinny on Threat Level's new sponsorship drive. Break out your wallet. We're going cheap.