vttoth — April 30th, 2009
According to CNN, the government of Egypt began slaughtering pigs; according to RFE, Tajikistan banned the import of pork and poultry from certain countries.
Are these politicians really this bone dead stupid, or are they playing politics? Have they not heard that just because it’s swine flu, you a) cannot get it from eating pork, and b) it’s an imminent pandemic not because it’s carried by pigs (it isn’t, never mind the origin of the virus), but transmitted from human to human?
When an entire country acts in such a boneheaded way, I begin to wonder how long before a politician somewhere manages to make a really bad decision and wipes us all out. It might happen yet!
Categories: Health, Politics |
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vttoth — April 27th, 2009
It’s April 27, in Ottawa, supposedly the second (third? sixth?) coldest capital city in the world. The temperature outside is presently 30.5°C outside (30°C according to the Weather Network) and still rising. Weren’t we wondering this time last year (okay, maybe a little earlier, but just a little) whether or not we were going to break the all-time snowfall record?
Categories: Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — April 27th, 2009
I’ve run the first realistic tests of the kind of computation that I am planning to perform on my new machine with the GPU “supercomputer” card. Here is a “before” picture:
Self-gravitating star cluster on the CPU
And now, the exact same program running on the GPU:
Self-gravitating star cluster on the GPU
I’d say that’s quite an improvement. To say the least.
The calculation in this case computed the self-gravitational forces in a cluster of 10,000 stars… it seems that the GPU can perform this computation at least 20 times a second. That’s quite remarkable.
Categories: Computers, Physics |
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vttoth — April 26th, 2009
There is this on-going debate as to whether the Obama administration should or should not prosecute officials of the Bush administration who formulated “enhanced interrogation” policies. Some suggest that it is unfair to prosecute people who were merely performing their official duties.
Oh really? So why did we prosecute Nazis? Adolf Eichmann said it most eloquently in his memoirs: he was only following orders, and his desire in life was to perform his duties superbly and please his superiors. So why did we not give him a freaking medal instead of hanging him?
It might be politically expedient for Obama not to prosecute anyone. But don’t try to suggest please that somehow, it is the “right” thing to do. The only right thing to do is to hold people fully accountable for what they had done, especially people at the top who made key decisions. Like, people who authorized torture, people who asked for, and drafted, legal opinions that authorized torture in a language that would have made Orwell proud.
Categories: Politics |
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vttoth — April 25th, 2009
Watching the outrage over the DHS memos that purportedly target all Americans on the political right as potential enemies of the state, I have come to the realization that a great many political conspiracy theories are based on a trivial error in formal logic: namely, that the implication operator is not commutative.
The implication operator, A → B (A implies B) is true if A is false (B can be anything) or if both A and B are true. In other words, it is only false if A is true but B is false. However, A → B does not imply B → A; the former is true when A is false but B is true, but the latter isn’t.
Yet this is what is at the heart of many conspiracy theories. For instance, a DHS report might say, that those on the fringe of the political right are motivated by the Obama government’s more permissive stance on stem cell research. Some draw the conclusion that this report implies that all who are troubled by Obama’s stance on this issue must be right-wing extremists. I could write this symbolically as follows: we have
member(e, s) → prop(e, p)
where member(e, s) means that e is a member of set s, and prop(e, p) means that e has property p. This symbolic equation cannot be reversed: it does not follow that prop(e, p) → member(e, s).
A closely related mistake is the confusion of the universal and existential operators. The existential operator (usually denoted with an inverted E, but I don’t have an inverted E on my keyboard, so I’ll just use a regular E), E(s, p) says that the set s has at least one member to which property p applies. The universal operator (denoted with an inverted A; I’ll just use a plain A), A(s, p) says that all members of set s have property p. Clearly, the two do not mean the same. Yet all too often, people (on both sides of the political aisle, indeed a lot of the politically correct outrage happens because of this) make this error and assume that once it has been asserted that E(s, p), it is implied that A(s, p). (E.g., a logically flawless statement such as “some blacks are criminals” is assumed to imply the racist generalization that all blacks are criminals.)
One might wonder why formal logic is not taught to would be politicians. I fear that in actuality, the situation is far worse: that they do know formal logic, and use it to their best advantage assuming that you don’t.
Categories: Mathematics, Politics |
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vttoth — April 24th, 2009
I built a new computer. It is a fairly decent computer, but what makes it special is its video card: it is a card that, in addition to producing graphics, can also be used for numerical computations.
The raw speed of the card is one TFLOP. That is, one trillion (single-precision) floating-point instructions per second.
It wasn’t that long ago that not even the world’s biggest supercomputer came even close to this kind of computing power.
I wonder how many such GPU cards are presently being used in places like Iran’s or North Korea’s weapons laboratories. And it’s not like it’s easy to ban their exports to such countries… the card, while bearing the ATI/AMD logo, was nonetheless manufactured in China.
Categories: Computers |
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vttoth — April 21st, 2009
One issue repeatedly discussed by talking heads (including Dick Cheney) on CNN is whether or not torture works. As if the end, in this case, could justify the means.
Frankly, I don’t care if torture works. Civilized people don’t torture, period. Sure, it makes it harder to maintain security, just as other outdated ideas like freedom of speech or freedom of association make it harder to maintain security. But that is the price of liberty, as has been observed by many, including America’s Founding Fathers.
Incidentally, I can think of an exception. Suppose I am a NYC police officer and it comes to my knowledge that a terrorist in my custody has set up an atomic bomb in the city. I only have minutes. I beat him to a pulp, break a few bones and all that, and he tells me the location and deactivation code of the bomb. I save the city. Then, I might stand trial for torturing the terrorist, but receive a presidential pardon due to exceptional circumstances. Yes, I can imagine something like that.
What I cannot imagine is the government of a civilized country authorizing torture in advance, as a matter of policy. Civilized countries just don’t do this. It’s really that simple, and I don’t care what Dick Cheney thinks… indeed, maybe Obama is wrong and Cheney should stand trial and spend some quite time in jail, which would give him an opportunity to think and reconsider his stance.
Categories: Politics |
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vttoth — April 20th, 2009
I am watchin Deep Impact tonight, a ten-year old film about a comet impacting the Earth. Why the Canadian History Channel is showing this film is a good question. Future history? Imagined history?
But putting that question aside, the movie made me go to Wikipedia again, and I ended up (re-)reading several articles there relating to the issue of global warming and controversies surrounding it.
One thing that struck me (and not for the first time) is this: criticism of global warming theories are often dismissed by the assertion that these go “against the mainstream” or are “not supported by scientific consensus.”
And global warming is by no means the only area of science where such arguments are frequently invoked. Take two topics that I have become involved with. There is scientific consensus that the inadequacy of Einstein’s theory of gravitation to explain the rotation of galaxies and large scale features of the universe is due to “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Even though no one knows what dark matter (or dark energy) is made of, and no one actually detected any dark matter or dark energy ever, the idea is treated as fact. True, dark matter theory can explain a few things and even made a few minor (but nonetheless impressive) predictions, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true, and it certainly doesn’t make the theory the only kid on the block worth considering. Still, try proposing an alternative gravity theory: no matter how firmly rooted in real physics it is, you will be fighting an uphill battle.
Or take the Higgs boson. This hypothetical particle (often along with the graviton) is often portrayed as if it has already been detected. It hasn’t. Indeed, the only thing experiments have accomplished to date is that they excluded the possibility that the Higgs boson exist at nearly the two-σ level. There are also significant unresolved issues with the Higgs boson that put the theoretical validity of the idea into question. Yet the “scientific consensus” is that the Higgs boson exists, and if you try to propose a quantum field theory without the Higgs, well, good luck!
Just to be clear about it, I am not saying that the climate skeptics got it right, and for all I know, maybe there is dark matter out there in abundant quantities, along with Higgs bosons behind every corner. But not because this is what the “scientific consensus” says but because the theory is supported by facts and by successful predictions. Otherwise, the theory remains “just a theory”, as the creationist crowd likes to say… neglecting the inconvenient fact that, of course, the theory of evolution is supported by an abundance of facts and successful predictions.
Categories: Physics, Weather and Climate |
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vttoth — April 19th, 2009
I’ve known the name of Eduardo Rozsa-Flores, as I’ve read his memoirs, published in the 1990s, about his participation in the Yugoslav war. He’s of Hungarian-Bolivian descent, described as an adventurer, writer, publicist, and journalist (among other things) by the Hungarian edition of Wikipedia.
He was certainly a strange and colorful character, but nonetheless, I did not expect him to be shot dead by Bolivian police in an alleged plot to assassinate the Bolivian president, Evo Morales. Was Rozsa-Flores really an assassin, or is it just another sign of the deterioration of the Bolivian republic under the rule of an, ahem, colorful individual in the role of president? Maybe we will find out one day. I’m not holding my breath.
Categories: Hungary, Politics |
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vttoth — April 17th, 2009
It is now official: the United States tortured suspected terrorists between 2001 and 2008.
President Obama wisely chose not to prosecute people. The purpose of bringing these memos to light was not to launch a witchhunt but the bring about a clean slate.
However, I am mildly amused (if that’s the right word) by the interpretation that I hear from some commentators: that CIA agents who engaged in torture should not be prosecuted since they acted in good faith, following the orders and explanations of their superiors.
But… during the Nurenberg trials, has it not been established that individuals cannot use this as their defense? That they are responsible for criminal acts even if they acted in good faith and under orders from their superiors?
Categories: Physics |
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