France's National Museum of Natural History on Tuesday unveiled the world's first "plastinated" squid -- a 6.5-metre-long (21.25-feet) deep-sea beast donated by New Zealand and named in honour of a creature featuring in Maori legend.

Plastination entails replacing the animal's water, fat and other liquids with a polymer that hardens.

It means the specimen can be appreciated in three dimensions in a dry, solid state, rather than in a jar filled with formalin or alcohol, whose glass distorts the view.

The squid was hauled up in January 2000 at a depth of 615 metres (2,000 feet) by fishermen off New Zealand.

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The 65,000-euro (100,000-dollar) plastination, carried out by Italian lab VisDocta Research, took two and a half years, during which the specimen of Architeuthis sanctipauli lost 2.5 metres (seven feet) of its length through drying out.

Wheke is being given pride of place in the Paris museum's Great Gallery of Evolution, its centrepiece exhibit on biodiversity.

The giant squid, Architeuthis, of which there are three sub-species, is a potent source of maritime tales of tentacled monsters able to grab a ship and pull it down to its doom. The critter memorably featured in Jules Vernes' "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," trying to engulf the submarine Nautilus.

In real life, though, the species is rather less gigantic -- about 13 metres (42.25 feet) from the caudal fin to the tip of its suckered tentacles. Females are larger than males.

Doctors call it "treating the numbers" — trying to get a patient's test results to a certain target, which they assume will treat — or prevent — disease. But earlier this year, a study on a widely used cholesterol drug challenged that assumption.

Vytorin, a combination of two cholesterol-lowering agents, certainly lowers cholesterol. But patients taking it didn't have any less plaque in a major artery than those taking a less-potent drug.

I'm assuming that less plaque generally does translate to fewer adverse events, but the article doesn't cover this. Helpfully, in medicine we generally have a pretty clear definition of an adverse event, and we're not dealing with intelligent active threats. Active threats (virus, bacteria, fungus, parasite), but not intelligent... We don't try to design cholesterol treatments to fend off a malicious food company that has designed a new more dangerous form of cholesterol that our drug can't fight :)

Knowing what to measure in security is hard though. We've covered a little of this before here.

If you're looking for more formal treatments of security metrics - check out the Quality of Protection (QoP) workshop held as part of the ACM CCS Conference.

"The goal of the QoP Workshop is to help security research progress towards a notion of Quality of Protection in Security comparable to the notion of Quality of Service in Networking, Software Reliability, or measures in Empirical Software Engineering."

Over the next few posts I'll take a few of the papers from the workshop and discuss a bit of their results. If you're interested in the TOC for the workshop, you can find it here.