Anthony Atkielski wrote:
Keith writes:
.....and you can tell a lot about me by
watching the temperature sensors at my house
(http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/home_temp.html)
Such as what?
Well, for starters, he lists temperature in both F and C, so he's
probably not an "American". In fact, he lists C first, so it's almost
certain that he's not 'Merkin.
Also, the general locus of values for outside air temp would imply
that it's damned cold outside, so he's probably somewhere rather closer
to the North pole than I am. Another conclusion, probably related to
this, is that he consistantly keeps his house significantly warmer than
the outside, so he is likely to be a mammal, a bird, or a reptile.
What else? Ah, yes.... investigating the periodic changes in outside
temperature, it becomes clear that it is, in fact, on a daily cycle, but
it's nothing like the skewed sine wave one would expect from a
sun-driven heat system. It's more like a sawtooth waveform.
Hmmm. The temperature is lowest in late morning, long after the sun
would have started warming things up if his idea of "outside" involved
things that the sun would warm, but then it skyrockets upward until late
afternoon, whereupon it starts a slow drop back down. Perhaps Keith's
outside air thermometer is _really_ outside, in full view of the sun,
but on the west side of his house so the sun doesn't start cooking it
until about 9 AM or so? This would explain the absurdly fast
temperature rise that is both compressed, and delayed from normal
daylight heating hours.
See? Nothing more than a simple graph, and we have learned a great
deal about this "Keith" character (and probably more about the rest of
us).
If his thermometers (and his thermostat) are available through the
web, perhaps we could run some tests here........ What kind of
experiments would we need to run, in order to tie this sub-thread back
into the security discussion?
--
: Unable to locate coffee. Operator halted.