Spinor Info

Sunday 1AM

Feb 052012

I am not usually up this late, but I’ve been working a lot tonight. So it’s 1AM and I am still sitting in front of my computer. That’s when it happened… an occurrence that looked eerily like something I’ve seen recently, when my expensive video card died. The system became excessively busy, the mouse pointer froze, and eventually, the Aero glass interface was shut down, for no apparent reason. Oh no… was my computer about to kill another pricey graphics card? But then, in a few minutes, everything was back to normal, with no sign of trouble in the Event Viewer. The only relevant entry was one indicating that the Aero user interface was shut down by a request from the Windows System Assessment Tool. But why? Then, this sentence on Wikipedia caught my eye: “In addition to tests requested by the user, WinSAT is scheduled to automatically run every week. The default schedule is 1am on Sundays”.

Live and learn.

Goodbye, Malév

Aviation, Hungary, Personal No Responses »

Feb 032012

Hungary’s flagship airline is no more: after 66 years of operations, Malév unceremoniously stopped flying after two of its airplanes were grounded in Tel Aviv by a demand for advance payment for fuel and services.

Though the news is not unexpected (Malév has been in deep trouble ever since it was ordered to repay several hundred million dollars worth of state subsidies that were deemed illegal by the European Union), I am still saddened. My first ever professional contract in 1979 (yes, I was still in high school) was to write code to simulate the take-off of Malév-owned TU-134 aircraft at Budapest’s Ferihegy airport under various adverse conditions, calculating the maximum safe take-off weight. I also have other memories, such as nearly missing a Malév flight in Bucharest in 1983, as in Ceausescu’s capital by that time, fuel was scarce, public transport was unreliable, and taxicabs fueled by natural gas were not accepting passengers to the airport due to the chronic fuel shortage and rationing. (I hitchhiked and caught my flight with only seconds to spare.) Ferihegy Airport without Malév is just not the same.

Loaner cat

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Feb 012012

Once again, we have a feline visitor in our house: Poppy, the cat of a friend of ours, has been spending the past two weeks here while her owner is out of town. Poppy is a 20th century cat, but she is in good health and as playful as ever. I am looking forward to many more of her visits in the years to come.

Gotta love Rogers

Canada, Internet No Responses »

Jan 302012

Rogers is supposed to be one of Canada’s leading telecommunication companies. I guess bigger does not necessarily mean better.

Back in August, I upgraded my cable Internet service to a small business package. This itself turned into a comedy of errors: to effect the upgrade, I had to order separately the small business service on the one hand, and cancel my residential service on the other. Sure enough, Rogers managed to cancel the freshly ordered small business service instead, and I spent an hour and a half (!) on the phone with them before it got sorted out. But, I digress.

Presently, I’ve been trying to access this small business account online. Ever since my residential service was canceled, when I logged on to Rogers.com, I saw my wireless and cable TV accounts, but not the Internet account. Cool, I have the option to add a new account, and I certainly have all necessary information. So let’s give it a try. I did so last week… and the service still isn’t shown in the interface. But just today, I received a postal (!) letter from Rogers, confirming that I registered this account.

There is also the option to view small business services on Rogers.com. There, I can again try to add my account. But it isn’t happening… instead, I get an error indicating that the service is unavailable.

OK, let’s try to call Rogers. The letter they sent had an 877-number, which I tried to call, only to get an automated message telling me that they now have online chat support and for all other inquiries, I should call their main number… click, dial tone. There is another number, for small business support… but when I call it, all the announcements are in French, with no option to choose English.

OK, let’s try live chat. The link, helpfully, is right there on the main page of Rogers.com. Click on it and… 404 error, page not found.

Oh really. Come on guys, I don’t necessarily expect perfection, but this is downright amateurish.

Harper’s bold plans

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Jan 272012

I never know what to think of our esteemed prime minister, Mr. Harper.

Every so often he comes across as eloquent, competent, knowledgeable and trustworthy. But just when I am ready to start trusting him…

There is of course his planned copyright bill, with its Draconian DRM provisions, which he seems determined to ram through Parliament despite opposition by many (who, incidentally, were dismissed as “radical extremists” by Harper’s Industry Minister).

Then there is Harper’s much disputed crime bill, introducing tougher sentences and such in an era of declining crime rates. Why? Is this a policy based on fact or ideology?

And now, we hear, Harper may want to fix our old age security pension system. Which presumes that the system is currently broken. But is it, really? An article today in The Globe and Mail suggests otherwise: in Canada, Old Age Security consumes only 2.41% of our GDP (compare this with places like Italy, where the figure is closer to 14%) and even in 20 years, this figure is expected to reach only 3.14%.

Mr. Harper has several more years at the helm, even if he is not re-elected. I sure hope that he will be more inclined in the future to push aside ideology and base his governing instead on facts and reality.

Newt on the Moon

Politics, Space No Responses »

Jan 272012

Normally, I would get tremendously excited to hear about a serious proposal to establish a permanent lunar colony. (Where do I sign up?)

Unfortunately, when Newt Gingrich floated this idea while campaigning in Florida, I did not feel excited at all. That is because I have very little doubt that this was simply an exercise in transparent political opportunism. Mr. Gingrich is hoping to gain some votes in the Space Coast, but I suspect that even residents there, whose livelihood for a long time has depended on a healthy space program, will see through his blatant pandering.

NASA’s week of mourning

Space No Responses »

Jan 262012

NASA’s week of mourning begins tomorrow. The three deadly accidents in NASA’s history all happened in late January/early February. Apollo 1 caught fire 45 years ago on January 27, 1967, killing Grissom, White and Chaffee. Challenger exploded 26 years ago, on January 28, 1986, killing all seven on board. And Columbia broke up during reentry on February 1, 2003, just nine years ago, killing another seven people. Why these accidents all happened during the same calendar week remains a mystery.

Discontinuous time

Astronomy, Physics, Society, Space No Responses »

Jan 242012

When I write about things like precision orbit determination, I often have to discuss the difference between ephemeris time (ET) and coordinated universal time (UTC). ET is a “clean” time scale: it is essentially the time coordinate of an inertial coordinate frame that is attached to the barycenter of the solar system. On the other hand, UTC is “messy”: it is the time kept by noninertial clocks sitting here on the surface of the Earth. But the fact that terrestrial clocks sit inside the Earth’s gravity well and are subject to acceleration is only part of the picture. There are also those blasted leap seconds. It is because of leap seconds that terrestrial atomic time (TAI) and UTC differ.

Leap seconds arise because we insist on using an inherently wobbly planet as our time standard. The Earth wobbles, sometimes unpredictably (for instance, after a major earthquake) and we mess with our clocks. Quite pointlessly, as a matter of fact. And now, we missed another chance to get rid of this abomination: the International Telecommunication Union failed to achieve consensus, and any decision is postponed until 2015.

For the curious, an approximate formula to convert between TAI and ET is given by ET – TAI = 32.184 + 1.657×10^–3 sin E, where E = M + 0.01671 sin M, M = 6.239996 + 1.99096871×10^–7 t and t is the time in seconds since J2000 (that is, noon, January 1, 2000, TAI). The convert TAI to UTC, additional leap seconds must be added: 10 seconds for all dates prior to 1972, and then additional leap seconds depending on the date. Most inelegant.

Speaking of leap this and that, I think it’s also high time to get rid of daylight savings time. Its benefits are dubious at best, and I find the practice unnecessarily disruptive.

Rad Decision

Environment, Physics, Technology No Responses »

Jan 222012

A couple of weeks ago, somewhere I saw a blog comment that mentioned a book, Rad Decision, written by nuclear engineer James Aach.

Back in the late 1970s, when I got my hands on The Prometheus Crisis by Scortia and Robinson, I just couldn’t put the damn thing down; I read through the night and I finished the book by the morning. So naturally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy the last in-stock copy of Aach’s book on Amazon.ca.

And I am glad I did. My concerns that it would be a trashy, amateurishly written novel quickly dissipated. Indeed, in a sense it is a lot better than The Prometheus Crisis: the crisis in Aach’s book is far less dramatic, but the story is believable, the characters perhaps more credible.

My only concern: while this book teaches a lot about nuclear power (and why we should not fear it), its likely audience already knows. Those who would benefit the most from reading it, well, won’t.

The route of Costa Concordia

Transportation No Responses »

Jan 182012

Courtesy of Lloyd’s List (a maritime publication that I don’t think I ever heard of previously) we now know the route of the ill-fated cruise ship Costa Concordia, and also that at least on one previous occasion, it followed a nearly identical route. One speculation is that the captain may have been using a low-resolution British naval chart (and thus when he asserted that the rock his ship ran into was not on the chart, he may have been telling the truth). This chart should never have been used for coastal navigation; indeed, a ship the size of the Costa Concordia (as large as a supercarrier) had no business being that near a rocky shore in the first place.

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