Story of My Life - part 17

When I returned from my camping trip, I tried to get back online, but the browsers I tried didn't open. So I opened Notepad, and wrote:

***

Please unblock YouTube. I would like to listen to music.

***

Lo and behold, the browser mysteriously opened, so I wrote 'thank you' in Notepad. I spent the rest of the month typing in what I called my mental sandbox. I was certain my computer activity was being monitored and I tried to write reassuring things. Once when I left my room to get lunch, when I parked at the post exchange, two soldiers from my company got out of the car next to me and said they'd been following me since I left the barracks. When I asked them why, they said they were instructed to find me and make sure my ID card would stay valid through my last day in the Army, which is something I mentioned in my mental sandbox. 

When I moved into my new apartment, I suspected I would see the mysterious black screens again, and in a few weeks, I did. At this point I was upset that despite the jig being up, I was being monitored instead of being interviewed in person. I expressed my anger in my mental sandbox and then all of the sudden I got a text from my closest military friend, the one who loaned me the Achilles in Vietnam book. Over the next few months, there were another five or six times she would text me after I wrote something emotional in my mental sandbox. In a way it was reassuring to know that my closest friend was in cahoots with my mysterious monitors. If she was helping them, then surely, they had no nefarious intentions. 

My last full day in the Army, I went to a place with a dozen soldiers from my company where we threw axes and did escape rooms. One room and an insane asylum theme and the other had an NSA/hacking theme. It was like the owners made those rooms just for it, though I think it was merely a coincidence that time. The owner is an Army veteran and had some kind of intelligence or electronic warfare job, based on the decorations I saw which were souvenirs from his service. 

At the end of May, I left for my celebratory road trip to dig for dinosaur bones in Wyoming. I booked the dig through the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis. Although it's called digging, it's really more about scraping and brushing the crumbly mud stone of the Morrison formation which covers much of the state. After several hours of diligent excavation in over 100 degrees of heat, I found a bone, and a good size one at that. 

It was big enough that it was tagged BS 1990 and set to the lab for cleaning. It will probably get sold to another museum. It was wonderful to finally fulfill I dream I had since I was in kindergarten, and on my first try too. Because the young woman I was digging with didn't find anything, I decided to share the credit with her. Because her name was Amanda, I suggested to the guide that in the unlikely event it belonged to a new species, it should be named Tomandasaurus (from 'Tom-Amanda-saurus'). Later after a paleontologist examined the bone, I got an email saying it was the metatarsal of a Camarasaurus.  

By this time, I was a few days past my discharge date from the Army, but because of the interesting events which happened in the following months, my story does not end here. 

I spent most of June on the road, including five days where I got stranded in Baker, Nevada after my car broke down. I camped in the backyard of the mechanic who tried unsuccessfully to fix my car. On the plus side, I had some great beer while there and finished the works of Shakespeare. It's a good thing I brought that book with me. Baker, Nevada, because it is so far away from any city, is a wonderful place to view the stars. They're so much brighter there. It was also great to see the nearby bristlecone pines in Great Basin National Park. I walked through a grove of them, and most were at least 5,000 years old. 

When I got back, it took me about two weeks to find a welding job. It was the fastest job hunt of my life and left me greatly encouraged about my future. Although the pay was decent and the work interesting enough, after about a month I was getting bored with it. I think I spent more time sweeping the floor and mowing the lawn than welding, though I admit that I am not a very good welder. Once when I was mowing the lawn, I was thinking about how in college I worked extra hard for an A in multivariable calculus and now I was doing this for $17 an hour. Not a terrible fate, just thought I could do better.

One weekend, I decided to look up a list of unsolved problems in computer science on Wikipedia. One of them was the existence of one-way functions, which if proven to exist, would be extremely useful for cryptography. There are functions used in cryptography today which are thought to be one-way, but only because of the limits of the best computers currently available. After many hours of deep thought and a few cups of coffee, I believe I discovered such a function and plotted it with an online graphing calculator. The equation was elegant and for the sake of national security, I will neither write it nor describe it here. I will note that the NSA made the secure hashing algorithm (better known as SHA) available to the public in 1995, and it is what makes internet communication secure. At least, it will be a secure method until significantly faster computers are invented.