Temperatures like this just do not exist in Canada.
When you hear that the temperature was within a hair’s breadth of 50 degrees centigrade (well over 120 F) you’d think I am talking about a spot in the Sahara Desert. Or maybe the Australian Outback. Or Death Valley.
But no, this temperature was measured earlier today in Lytton, British Columbia, Canada.
It is surreal. Scary. And deadly: apparently, dozen’s of mostly older people succumbed to this heat wave in BC.
Recently, it felt at times almost like a fad: Questioning the legacy of past celebrities, removing statues, renaming institutions.
Often, it seemed like these denounced heroes of the past are held to an impossible standard: Not living up to the changing values of the present.
I questioned the motivation: Was it true concern that we worship the wrong heroes, or just a cheap attempt at “virtue signaling”? I questioned the outcome: Exactly how does renaming a high school or removing a statue from a public park help an Indigenous community get safe drinking water, better jobs, better health care?
But more importantly, I questioned the wisdom of judging the past by the standards of the present. Standards that evolve and (thankfully!) improve, but which, for that very reason, would have been impossible for our past heroes to live up to, as those standards did not yet exist.
Faced with the discovery of the unmarked graves of many hundreds of Canadian children that is reopening the wounds of the despicable residential school system, I was wondering the same thing. Were these schools really the manifestations of evil? Or were they perhaps no different from other residential schools for the poor, for the children of immigrants, for other disadvantaged members of a society that, let’s face it, was quite bigoted by present-day standards?
But now I have my answer. What took place in those schools a century ago was not normal, not acceptable. It was criminal, even by the standards of early-1900s Canada. It’s just that nobody cared.
How do I know? From the accounts of someone who was in a unique position to critique the system: Peter Henderson Bryce, who at one point served as Canada’s Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Immigration.
For many years, Bryce studied the health of Canada’s Indigenous population, specifically the conditions at the residential schools. He was appalled by what he saw as an underfunded system of unsanitary, crowded facilities with shockingly high mortality rates. His report was suppressed and he was instead eventually pushed out of the Civil Service. Refusing to be silenced, he published his report himself.
The title says it all:
A National Crime
So there we have it. We are not misapplying our much improved, enlightened standards of 2021 to judge people and institutions that existed a century ago. What they did back then, how they treated the Indigenous population of Canada was A National Crime even by the standards of a contemporary member of the establishment, a dedicated civil servant who was already a teenager when the Dominion of Canada was established in 1867.
Dr. Peter Bryce, M. D., who passed away in 1932 at the age of 78, is buried not far from our home, right here in Ottawa, in the famed Beechwood Cemetery.
My beautiful wife and I both received our second jabs today.
Our first dose was AstraZeneca, but it is now recommended to choose an mRNA vaccine for the second dose. My remaining concern is whether this mixed shot is good enough to enter other countries, the United States in particular, where the AZ vaccine never received emergency FDA approval. We shall see… worst case, I guess, is that we will need a third dose.
I am reacting with horror to the killing of a Muslim family in London, Ontario, by a deranged lunatic who mowed them down with his vehicle.
Yumna Afzaal (15), Madiha Salman (44), Talat Afzaal (74) and Salman Afzaal (46).
What drives a man to massacre an entire family, including children, as they are waiting to cross the street at an intersection?
And how do we fix this?
It is very easy to ascribe the attack to racism or “white grievance” (his race was not publicized but one press image surfaced that shows him to be of European descent) and chances are, it would not be the wrong conclusion. But if we stop there, we have solved nothing. The problems will persist, more people will die, and our society will become more polarized over time.
That is not to suggest that I know how to solve this problem. But I know what not to do. This is best illustrated by a quote that is often wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela (it actually comes from a human rights activist named Mohamad Safa):
Our world is not divided by race, color, gender or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion.
I agree with the sentiment, but I ask a question that, in my opinion, is really the key to it all: How do we convince wise people (or people who think of themselves as wise) not to divide us into wise people and fools?
A few days ago, I posted an old Far Side cartoon about an accident at a virology lab. It was intended as humor, appropriate in light of the announcement that the US government seeks additional information concerning the possible role of the Wuhan virology lab in the pandemic. This investigation was triggered by the revelation that back in November 2019, researchers from that lab became sick with symptoms similar to those of COVID-19, compounded by secrecy by the Chinese government.
I think this investigation is warranted. I do not prejudge its outcome.
I do feel it is important to mention, however, that there is a difference between engineering a virus vs. releasing a virus. The fact that COVID-19 is not an engineered virus was well-established early on. Conclusions can of course change in the light of new information but I don’t think there is much room for change here. It has all the hallmarks of a virus that jumped from animals to humans (which such viruses, I am told, often do) and none of the hallmarks of a bioengineered virus. So I think in light of that it is quite unlikely that the virus was the result of, e.g., a botched bioweapons experiment or worse yet, an intentional pandemic.
Could it have been accidentally released? That’s another story altogether. The mandate of the Wuhan lab, I understand, is to research illnesses such as SARS or COVID-19. This lab produced many research papers over the years warning the world that a much more serious pandemic than the SARS epidemic is possible, even likely. Those papers were prophetic, but largely unheeded. It would be ironic if the same lab was found responsible in the end for causing the very pandemic that it tried to help prevent, and if the Chinese government played a role in suppressing information that, early on, could have saved many lives, they should be held responsible.
But for now, we don’t know if any of this is true. The Far Side cartoon was not intended to imply anything. It is just… funny, and uncannily prophetic. Just like the Wuhan lab’s research papers from years past.
Thanks to a share on Facebook, I now know exactly what happened in Wuhan in November, 2019.
This.
Sweet dreams…
I’ll be giving a virtual talk tonight, courtesy of a Texas astronomy club:
I hope it will be well received.
We just released another beautiful new version of Maxima, 5.45.0. This time around, it also includes changes (for the first time in years) to the tensor packages, based on a very comprehensive set of proposed patches by a devoted Maxima user.
We have a new manuscript on arXiv. Its title might raise some eyebrows: Algebraic wave-optical description of a quadrupole gravitational lens.
Say what? Algebra? Wave optics? Yes. It means that in this particular case, namely a gravitational lens that is described as a gravitational monopole with a quadrupole correction, we were able to find a closed form description that does not rely on numerical integration, especially no numerical integration of a rapidly oscillating function.
Key to this solution is a quartic equation. Quartic equations were first solved algebraically back in the 16th century by Italian mathematicians. The formal solution is usually considered to be of little practical value, as it entails cumbersome algebra, and polynomial equations can be routinely and efficiently solved using numerical methods.
But in this case… The amazing thing is that the algebraic solution reveals so much about the physics itself!
Take this figure from our paper, for instance:
On the left is light projected by the gravitational lens, its so-called point-spread function (PSF) which tells us how light from a point source is distributed on an imaginary projection screen by the lens. On the right? Why, that’s the discriminant of the quartic equation
$$ x^4-2\eta\sin\mu \, x^3+\big(\eta^2-1\big)x^2+\eta\sin\mu \, x+{\textstyle\frac{1}{4}}\sin^2\mu=0, $$
in a plane characterized by polar coordinates \((\eta,\tfrac{1}{2}\mu)\), that is, \(\eta\) as a radial coordinate and \(\tfrac{1}{2}\mu \) as an azimuthal angle. When the discriminant is positive, the equation is expected to have four real (or four complex) roots; everywhere else, it’s a mix of real and imaginary roots. This direct connection between the algebra and the lensing phenomenon is unexpected and beautiful.
The full set of real roots of this equation can be shown in the form of an animation:
Of course one must read the paper in order for this animation to make sense, but I think it’s beautiful.
How good is this quartic solution? It is uncannily accurate. Here is a comparison of the PSF computed using the quartic solution and also using numerical integration, as well as some enlarged details from the so-called caustic boundary:
It’s only in the immediate vicinity of the caustic boundary that the quartic solution becomes less than accurate.
We can also use the quartic solution to simulate images seen through a telescope (i.e., the Einstein ring, or what survives of it, that would appear around a gravitational lens when we looked at the lens through a telescope with a point source of light situated behind the lens.) We can see again that it’s only in the vicinity of the caustic boundary that the quartic solution produces artifacts instead of accurately reproducing it when spots of light widen into arcs:
This paper was so much joy to write! Also, for the first time in my life, this paper gave us a legitimate, non-pretentious reason to cite something from the 16th century: Cardano’s 1545 treatise in which the quartic solution (as well as the cubic) are introduced, together with discussion on the meaning of taking the square root of negative numbers.
No, it’s not one of my cats posting a blog entry.
Rather, it’s a whimsical title someone gave to the following composition:
I started my day listening to this. I am still smiling. I think it sounds a little bit like Klingon opera, or perhaps like a piano piece written by a Klingon composer. But it’s not bad, not bad at all.
I was watching a documentary on Netflix and a photo caught my attention. A beautiful, old photograph (shown in color in the documentary, but I suspect it was colorized, so I am including a black-and-white version instead that I found online) showing a young mother and her child, along with a stuffed toy animal:
This photo depicts the sister of Setsuko Thurlow (née Nakamura), a Japanese-Canadian peace activist, herself a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Unfortunately, her sister Ayako was not that lucky. She and her young son Eiji were badly burnt and soon perished.
I get it why the atomic bomb was deemed necessary. With everything I know today, I still would not, could not have made a decision different from that made by Harry Truman back in July, 1945 even if it meant that I could not ever sleep soundly afterwards throughout the remainder of my life. Not with some 10,000 people, most of them civilians, dying in the Pacific theater every day of the war.
Even so… War is horrifying.
Strangely, it’s the toy animal that humanized this picture for me more than anything else.
Last fall, I received an intriguing request: I was asked to respond to an article on the topic of dark matter in an online publication that, I admit, I never heard of previously: Inference: International Review of Science.
But when I looked, I saw that the article in question was written by a scientist with impressive and impeccable credentials (Jean-Pierre Luminet, Director of Research at the CNRS Astrophysics Laboratory in Marseille and the Paris Observatory), and other contributors of the magazine included well-known personalities like Lawrence Krauss or Noam Chomsky.
More importantly, the article in question presented an opportunity to write a response that was not critical but constructive: inform the reader that the concept of modified gravity goes far beyond the so-called MOND paradigm, that it is a rich and vibrant field of theoretical research, and that until and unless dark matter is actually discovered, it remains a worthy pursuit. My goal was not self-promotion: I did not even mention my ongoing collaboration with John Moffat on his modified theory of gravity, MOG/STVG. Rather, it was simply to help dispel the prevailing myth that failures of MOND automatically translate into failures of all efforts to create a viable modified theory of gravitation.
I sent my reply and promptly forgot all about it until last month, when I received another e-mail from this publication: a thank you note letting me know that my reply would be published in the upcoming issue.
And indeed it was, as I was just informed earlier today: My Letter to the Editor, On Modified Gravity.
I am glad in particular that it was so well received by the author of the original article on dark matter.
I began writing this last night, when my stepfather Tibor was still alive, albeit just barely.
He passed away this morning after a brief illness, spending his last few nights in a hospital. What began as shortness of breath turned out to be a massive case of pneumonia that now weakened his whole body. At 93 this is not exactly surprising: we don’t live forever and this is how we die.
I decided that I shall not grieve. Instead, I celebrate. I celebrate a life of 93 years, the good life of a good man, who treated me always as though I was his own son.
I celebrate a life that was lived mostly in good health, near perfect health as a matter of fact, except for a few scary moments in the past decade. But he recovered from it all, and up until last week, really, though he had mobility issues, he still looked radiantly healthy, 20 years younger than his true age.
So there will be no 50th wedding anniversary with my Mom in 2024. No 100th birthday party in 2028. So what? The life that he lived is still a very, very good life.
Here are a few pictures.
My Mom and Tibor met in 1974 in the resort that my stepfather managed. This picture is, I believe, from April 1974. The woman standing was the programs manager (“kultúros”) of the resort.
Here’s another, undated picture of Tibor from roughly the same time period:
Tibor and my Mom built a beautiful house in Visegrád. This is Tibor in the living room, around 1990 or so, under a small Christmas tree.
As communism came to an end, it upset the economy in many ways. In his late 50s, Tibor found a new way to earn an income: he bought a pickup truck and offered moving and delivery services.
This was Tibor just last year, when I last saw him in person, a visit to Hungary that now feels miraculous to have happened at all, in the calm before the storm, before the pandemic changed the world:
And now he is gone.
Just yesterday I came across my all time favorite movie quote on Facebook, a quote from Blade Runner:
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.“
The CBC just published a very informative article on the history of vaccine manufacturing in Canada, explaining why this G7 country, one of the top industrialized nations on Earth, is entirely dependent on imports when it comes to COVID-19 vaccinations.
It really is disgraceful. Canada’s Connaught Labs, founded in 1914, was at the forefront of global vaccine production for many decades.
But then came the decline. Vaccine production is not always a profitable enterprise. Connaught Labs was eventually nationalized by Pierre Trudeau’s government but then, as far as I am concerned inexplicably, the emphasis for this now Crown corporation was to turn a profit!
Why???
Eventually, it was reprivatized by Mr. Mulroney, who promised that the action will bring “net benefits” to Canadians.
Yeah, right.
The federal government is now investing serious monies to expand capabilities for future pandemics. I can only hope that this lesson is not going to be forgotten anytime soon.
So the other day, I made a foolish decision: I objected to a self-described progressive activist’s recurring, disparaging use of the expression, “white people”, on Twitter.
In response, I learned the following, thanks to helpful strangers:
OK, just to be clear, I am no more concerned about being called a racist than I am about being called a bicycle, on account of being neither. However, this reaction speaks volumes. In this new, progressive world, virtue signaling is key if you want progressives to like you. Saying disparaging things about white people gets you credit. Extra credit if you yourself happen to be white and practice a little self-loathing in public.
I used to have zero patience for my conservative-leaning white friends and acquaintances who were complaining about “anti-white racism” as they marched off to vote, or otherwise express support, for that stable genius, the Orange Person. But in light of this little Twitter exchange, I am somewhat less incredulous and more sympathetic.
No, I am still not rooting for Trumpists and their fellow travelers in other countries. But I do have a point to make, not that I expect the most vocally self-righteous progressives to listen: If you manage to turn someone like me (I am not exactly a stereotypical raging white supremacist) into a skeptic, do not be surprised if you lose by a landslide in future election cycles. Tone it down please. There is no need to turn into enemies people who dare to criticize excessive rhetoric, who see nuances where you only see black-and-white, who present inconvenient facts even when those being inconvenienced by them are not from the conservative camp. Listen to their criticism, don’t automatically reject their thoughtful objections in self-righteous indignation, in the name of ideological purity.
As for the Twitter exchange, I ended up doing something I do extremely rarely, unfollowing, even blocking some people when the conversation began to veer towards personal insults. (Because, you know, if you run out of thoughtful arguments, name-calling always works. Right.)
This morning, a drone took flight. It successfully took off from the ground, hovered for a few seconds, and then landed safely.
What, you ask? How is this supposed to be a big deal? There are millions of drones out there, kids playing with them and whatnot.
Oh, but this drone is special, and not only because it carries a small piece of fabric from the Wright brothers’ very first airplane.
It is special because it flew on Mars.
Yesterday it was hardware, today it was software.
An e-mail that I sent to a bell.ca address was rejected.
Perhaps I am mistaken but I believe that these Bell/Sympatico mailboxes are managed, handled by Yahoo!. And Yahoo! occasionally made my life difficult by either rejecting mail from my server or dropping it in the recipient’s spam folder. I tried to contact them once, but it was hopeless. Never mind that my domain, vttoth.com, is actually a few months older (July 1, 1994 as opposed to January 18, 1995) than Yahoo!’s and has been continuously owned by a single owner. Never mind that my domain was never used to send spam. Never mind that I get plenty of spam from Yahoo! accounts.
Of course you can’t fight city hall. One thing I can do, instead, is to implement one of the protocols Yahoo wants, the DKIM protocol, to authenticate outgoing e-mail, improving its chances of getting accepted.
But setting it up was a bloody nuisance. So many little traps! In the end, I succeeded, but not before resorting to some rather colorful language.
This little tutorial proved immensely helpful, so helpful in fact that I am going to save its contents, just in case:
Very well. It is time to return to more glamorous activities. It’s not like I don’t have things to do.
Working from my home office and running my own equipment (including server equipment) here means that I have some rather mundane tasks to perform. As a one-man band, I am my own IT support, and that includes software, as well as hardware.
The less glamorous part of software support is installing updates and patches, resolving driver conflicts, keeping external equipment such as routers and network switches up to date.
The less glamorous part of hardware support? Mostly it involves dust. Ginormous dust bunnies, that is.
Ever heard of the expression, “rat’s nest”? It is sometimes used to describe the tangle of cables and wires that hide behind a computer. Now imagine a computer to which several USB hubs, ten external hard drives and additional equipment are connected, most of which have their own power supply. Yes, it’s ugly. Especially if those little power bricks are plugged into a haphazardly assembled multitude of cheap power strips.
And dust collects everywhere. Thick, ugly dust, made of human dandruff, cat dandruff, hair (human and cat), fluff from clothing, crumbs from many past meals. Normally, you would just vacuum up this stuff, but you don’t want to disturb the rat’s nest. Plugs can come lose. You might lose data. And even if you don’t, simply finding the plug that came lose can be a royal pain in the proverbial.
Long story short, I’ve had enough. The other day, I ordered the longest power strip I could find on Amazon, with 24 outlets, complete with mounting brackets. And yesterday, I managed to affix it to the underside of my main desk.
Which means that yesterday and today, working my way through the list one piece of equipment at a time, I managed to move all power plugs to this new power strip. As it hangs from the underside of my desk, it’s most importantly not on the floor. So the floor can be (gasp!) cleaned.
And now I even have room to access my workstation’s side panels, if need be. One of these days, I might even be able to vacuum its back, removing years’ worth of dust from its fan grids. But for now, I contend myself with the knowledge that I freed up four (!) cheap power strips, a three-outlet extension cable, and a three-outlet plug, all of which were fully in use. What a liberating feeling.
Having spent a fair amount of time today on all fours under my desk, however, did prompt me to mutter, “I am too old for this,” several times this afternoon… especially as I still feel a bit under the weather, an unpleasant aftereffect, no doubt, of the COVID-19 vaccine I received yesterday.
Our vaccination appointment is booked. Yippie!
Yes, it is the AstraZeneca vaccine. No, I am not concerned about blood clots. The risks are very small, and are far outweighed by the benefits of becoming vaccinated. (Our family doctor enthusiastically agrees.)
Stereotypes hurt people.
Television, sitcoms in particular, often rely on stereotypes. But it’s not always a Bad Thing. When the stereotype itself is the object of ridicule, kind of holding up a mirror for the audience to look into, stereotypes can actually help turn ours into a better society. The Big Bang Theory is a good example: its Jewish (Howard Wolowitz) and Indian (Raj Koothrappali) protagonists mock not Jews and Indians but our prejudices.
But other stereotypes are more troubling. One notable example, discussed recently, is the character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in The Simpsons: a stereotypical Indian-American running a convenience store, speaking with a funny accent.
Yes, I recognize that the line between mocking people being stereotyped vs. mocking people who stereotype others is a thin one. But I think it is drawn somewhere between The Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons. The Big Bang Theory‘s humor is defensible because it does not dehumanize the protagonists. The Simpsons, sadly, doesn’t fare that well. No wonder Hank Azaria no longer wants to be the voice of Apu.
However, when it comes to the point of a Caucasian voice actor voicing a non-Caucasian character, I think we are going one step, no, make that one giant leap, too far.
You see, I thought actors, you know, act. That is, pretend to be something they are not.
But now you are telling me that a naturally blond actress cannot play a brunette? Or a Jewish actor cannot play a German officer?
Or is this concern specifically reserved for, I don’t know, “race”? Or what’s the new catchphrase, people who are “racialized”? (Whatever the devil that means.) Because somehow, the color of your hair doesn’t matter but the color of your skin makes you… different?
And does it go both ways? Are Indian actors forbidden to play Europeans? Are black actors forbidden to play white roles? In any case, who decides what kind of acting is acceptable, and what crosses the line? Heaven forbid, into the territory of “cultural appropriation”?
In my all time favorite movie, Cloud Atlas, several actors play as many as a half dozen different roles, in different eras and cultures. These include a Korean actress playing, in one storyline, the role of the wife of a 19th century San Francisco lawyer. Another Korean actress, in a male (!) role, plays as a bellboy in 1970s San Francisco. Hugo Weaving plays the role of a sadistic female nurse in early 21st century Scotland, but also the role of an authoritarian Korean politician in 22nd century New Seoul. And so on.
You can guess which of these roles were criticized by some. “Yellowface” we were told, as if Cloud Atlas had anything to do with Hollywood’s racist past from many decades ago. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Rather, what that movie told me with its choice of actors and roles is that skin color, this so-called “race”, matters as little as the color of your hair or your eyes. It means nothing. We are all members of the one and only human race. And just as a blond actress can play the role of a brunette or a male actor can play in a female role, a black actor can play as a white person while a person of European descent can credibly play a Korean. Because these superficial differences in appearance mean nothing.
The suggestion that a white actor cannot lend his voice to an Indian character in a cartoon is preposterously backward. It seems designed to maintain racial discrimination. It, to use that fashionable phrase again, promotes and preserves racialization, instead of helping us progress towards a post-racial society in which all human beings are judged by the strength of their character, and the color of their skin matters no more than the color of their hair.