The weird: a dis/orientation

A case of visual disorientation.

'Weird Machine' Patterns

You do not understand how your program really works until it has been 1 exploited. We believe that computer scientists and software engineers should regard 2 the activity of modern exploitation as an applied discipline that studies both the actual 3 computational properties and the practical computational limits of a target platform 4 or system. Exploit developers study the computational proper...

Worrying about weird winters

Winter is a key determinant of biological processes in temperate, alpine, and polar environments. Winters are changing, yet we currently lack the knowledge to adequately predict the impacts of climate change on winter biology, or to link winter conditions to the growing-season performance of most organisms.

"Weird Machines" in ELF: A Spotlight on the Underappreciated Metadata

Although software exploitation historically started as an exercise in coaxing the target’s execution into attackersupplied binary shellcode, it soon became a practical study in pushing the limits of unexpected computation that could be caused by crafted data not containing any native code. We show how the ABI metadata that drives the creation of a process’ runtime can also drive arbitrary compu...

Why quantum mechanics is weird

A trivial artificial universe is used to illustrate why the mathematics of quantum mechanics gives rise to four of its most notorious properties: nondeterminism, interference, disappearance of interference under observation, and entanglement. The artificial universe is designed to be about as simple as it can possibly be while still exhibiting interference; the other three properties naturally ...