The section on the Birthday Paradox (and Birthday Attack) was the most interesting to me. I have learned that paradox before, and even put the mathematical probability to the test. I was at a party and counted 22 people so I went around and asked everyone for their birthday. Unfortunately there were no matches, making me look pretty foolish, but I told them if one more person showed up they would have the same birthday as someone already there. However, I realize now even with 23 people the probability is still only slightly better than 50%. Maybe next time I'll try it with 60 people. With the Birthday Attack I am wondering why anyone would use it instead of the Baby Step Giant Step method. The book claims that it doesn't provide a guarantee of a match, and that the BSGS method is generally faster anyway.
The last section on using hash functions to encrypt was hard for me. It looked a lot like the example you did on Wednesday but I'm still a little confused. I keep thinking hash functions are going to look like nice algebra functions but it's becoming increasingly more obvious that they are a whole different breed of functions.
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