And sometimes music is something else.

Wow, his ear is really big.

Music, the net

Music connects us. We went to the concert together, I gave you the CD, we sang along as we drove the moving van from Chicago to San Francisco. I wrote a song with John that he sang with Erika at Pam's house. I brought a record to the Mallarkeys' party that Peter danced to ten times in a row. We could never agree on what the words were. You mentioned a record and I bought it before you knew my name. We saw the band play it on Saturday Night Live, twenty years before we met. I know the words and you know the tune. Together we can just about sing it. Come on, let's try it now.

It's good to be a boomer.

A study summarized in the most recent issue of Science has shown that guessing Social Security Numbers can be quite easy if one knows the person's place and date of birth--which often appear on facebook, for example.

Every Social Security number starts with three digits known as an "area number." Smaller states might have only one, whereas New York, for example, has 85. The next two digits are "group numbers," which can be anything from 01-99, but don't correspond to anything specific. The last four digits, the "serial number," are assigned sequentially. . .

When economist Alessandro Acquisti and computer scientist Ralph Gross of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, compared SSA's public death records with birth data, they found that area numbers are not rotated until all 9999 serial numbers have been assigned. . . . After 1989, individuals started receiving Social Security numbers at birth, rather than at their discretion (often when they began their first job), so pinpointing these people's numbers is especially easy, says Acquisti.

So easy in fact that Acquisti and Gross were able to do it themselves. Using fairly standard computer algorithms, the duo predicted the first five digits of Social Security numbers for people born after 1989 44% of the time on the very first try. On a handful of attempts, they managed to get all nine digits on the first try, but at the very least they could predict the full numbers of 8.5% of those born after 1989 in fewer than 1000 tries, they report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.