The Crooked and the Straight

Security is hard.

When people talk about security, they usually mean that they want to prevent some action from being take against some object: “I want to prevent the money from being stolen.” “I want to only teachers to be able to change the grade records.” “I want to keep attackers from gaining entry to the computer system.”

Security is really about economics, weighing costs against benefits. The goal of security is to make the cost of taking some unwanted action against an object greater than the benefit of securing it plus the value of the object itself. If you say “I want to prevent the money from being stolen,” you really mean “I want it to be more expensive to steal the money than the total value of the money plus the cost to protect it.” That’s why we feel secure in keeping 50 dollars in our wallet, but we hire armored trucks and guards with shotguns to feel secure in dealing with 500,000 dollars.

Sometimes the simple and obvious security solution—guards with shotguns—is the right solution. With security, however, the devil is in the details.

Consider: “I want to make sure that the yogurt I buy isn’t spoiled.”

Continue reading "Yogurt and security: a tale of two things" »

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How much sugar should you put into an 8-ounce serving of tea?

Well, it depends on what your goal is. Of course, it also depends on which specific kind of tea you're drinking, so as an example let's consider Honest Tea's Green Dragon Tea.

If you want to maximize the flavor of the tea (that is, to get the best flavor without making it too sweet), then about 3 teaspoons.

But if you're calorie-conscious, your goal is probably to maximize the tradeoff between flavor and calories (roughly, to make the most efficient use of sugar so as to get the most "flavor for your buck" for each additional calorie of sugar you add). In that case, the sweet spot (ahem) is 2 teaspoons of sugar per serving.

(Note that both of these goals are different than trying to minimize for calories. Since the least amount of sugar you can use is none, and no sugar contains zero calories, minimizing for calories would simply mean that you don't use any sugar.)

How do I know this? Because the answer is printed on the label.

[via Marginal Revolution]

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