The world’s population is expected to reach the magic number of 7 billion today. Trick or treat!
Federal government debt in the United States is expected to reach 100% of the country’s GDP today. Trick or treat!
Meanwhile, an almost unheard of October Nor’easter dumped over 30 inches of snow in some places in New England, leaving millions without power, thousands stranded in grounded airplanes or stuck trains, and a few people dead. Trick or treat!
Candy, anyone?
Yesterday, I watched Terminator Salvation, the latest movie in the Terminator franchise.
Today, I am reading in the news about an attempt to reconstruct visual images from MRI brain scans.
I am also reading about US military drones hacked by a virus of unknown origin and purpose.
All of which makes me wonder just how close we are actually to the kind of dystopian future depicted by the Terminator movies.
Back when I was learning the elementary basics of FORTRAN programming in Hungary in the 1970s, I frequently heard an urban legend according to which the sorry state of computer science in the East Bloc was a result of Stalin’s suspicious attitude towards cybernetics, which he considered a kind of intellectual swindlery from the decadent West. It seemed to make sense, neglecting of course the fact that the technological gap between East and West was widening, and that back in the 1950s, Soviet computers compared favorably to Western machines; and that it was only in the 1960s that a slow, painful decline began, as the Soviets began to rely increasingly on stolen Western technology.
Nonetheless, it appears that Stalin was right after all, insofar as cybernetics is concerned. I always thought that cybernetics was more or less synonymous with computer science, although I really have not given it much thought lately, as the term largely fell into disuse anyway. But now, I am reading an intriguing book titled “The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future” by Andrew Pickering, and I am amazed. For instance, until now I never heard of Project Cybersyn, a project conceived by British cyberneticists to create the ultimate centrally planned economy for socialist Chile in the early 1970s, complete with a futuristic control room. No wonder Allende’s regime failed miserably! The only thing I cannot decide is which was greater: the arrogance or dishonesty of those intellectuals who created this project. A project that, incidentally, also carried a considerable potential for misuse, as evidenced by the fact that its creators received invitations from other repressive regimes to implement similar systems.
Stalin may have been one of the most prolific mass murderers in history, but he wasn’t stupid. His suspicions concerning cybernetics may have been right on the money.
I hate to make a political point in the wake of a terrible tragedy but… I wonder if those who advocate profiling based on race, religion, and ethnicity are now in favor of subjecting young, blue-eyed, blond Christian males speaking with a Scandinavian accent to extra scrutiny.
Yelena Bonner is dead. May she rest in peace.
The concept of a modern general staff includes planning for every foreseeable contingency: thus, when something untoward happens, all general staff officers need to do is to take the appropriate planning folder off a shelf, dust it off, quickly check it to make sure it is not unduly dated, and then put the plan into practice.
What I didn’t know is that in the 21st century, such planning extended all the way to include the contingency of a runaway bride.
Here’s the story of a person, former US Air Force major Harold Hering, who dared to ask a simple question: if your hand rests on the launch key of a nuclear missile, and you receive a launch order, how do you know that the order is truly lawful? He had no answer, and he was discharged from the military for asking a Forbidden Question that went beyond his “need to know” in the reading of a US Air Force panel. But the question is as valid today as it was in the times of Nixon.
Of course the fundamental conundrum is this: a sane society facing a nuclear opponent may rely on a nuclear deterrent to prevent attack, even though (being sane) it has no desire to respond to genocide with genocide if the unthinkable actually happens. So… how do you convince your enemies that you would launch a retaliatory strike even when in reality, you would prefer not to do so because killing millions of innocents on the opposing side will not bring your countrymen back to life?
Am I a fan of nuclear power? Probably not… but I like it more than most of the alternatives, including many supposedly “clean” ones.
I have seen statistics before that showed nuclear to be one of the safest, if not the safest, form of electricity generation. I was trying to find the data, and instead, I found this excellent article on the topic, followed by a passionate, but surprisingly civilized discussion with actual information content.
I wonder how many of the purported 200,000 who protested against nuclear power in Germany actually realize that if their wishes came true, many more people would be condemned to death than those killed by all nuclear disasters combined. Here are two numbers to illustrate that point. The worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, killed perhaps as many as 10,000 people. Compare that to the worst hydroelectric disaster, the collapse of the Banqiao dam in China… roughly 170,000 killed.
Fukushima was hit by a once-in-a-millennium natural disaster that far exceeded its design limits. Not surprisingly, it failed, along with many other man-made things, buildings, oil refineries, roads, bridges, railway lines, and more. We don’t single out any one of those industries as being inherently unsafe, despite the fact that hundreds (thousands?) died in Japan as a result of these failures in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. In Fukushima, to date only one person died, in a crane accident. I’d say that this suggests that nuclear power is pretty safe even under a worse-than-worst-case scenario.
Banq
Back when the Iraq war was raging, I often put some statistics into my Day Book, comparing what has been said vs. what has been found (e.g., weapons of mass destruction.)
It’s time to do some statistics again.
Number of times the US economy (nominal GDP) is larger than China’s: 2.5 Number of times the US per capita GDP is larger than China’s: 10 Number of years it may take China to catch up to the US at present growth rates: 30 Number of people seriously injured by radiation at Fukushima: 0 Percentage of people in an informal CTV Ottawa poll who think nuclear power is unsafe: 53% Number of people protesting nuclear power in Germany: 60,000 Number of nuclear weapons in existence: 22,000 Largest nuclear weapon ever detonated (the Tsar Bomba): 60 megatons Number of Tsar Bomba’s with the energy equivalent of the Japanese earthquake: 100,000 Democracy index of China according to the Polity IV project: −7 Democracy index of Iran: −6 Democracy index of Iran just five years ago: 3 Democracy index of Japan: 10 Democracy index of Saudi Arabia: −10 Life expectancy in Japan (years): 82.6 (#1) Life expectancy in Canada (years): 80.7 (#11) Life expectancy in the United States (years): 78.1 (#36) Life expectancy in Iraq (years): 59.5 (#153) Life expectancy in Afghanistan (years): 43.8 (#188 out of 194) Number of top ten most literate US cities found in the top ten most conservative US states: 0 Number of top ten most literate US cities found in the top ten most liberal US states: 5 Ranking of the state of Mississippi in the list of conservative states: #1 Ranking of the state of Mississippi by health according to the United Health Foundation: #50
The thing about presenting raw numbers is that you can draw your own conclusions. Except of course that choosing which numbers to present may already amount to a not-so-subtle lie. For what it’s worth, I chose my numbers on a whim.
Courtesy of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, I just stumbled upon gapminder.org: an amazing data visualization project, complete with a downloadable desktop version, providing animated plots of many important economic, health, and social indicators. Statistics is usually a dry topic, but the bouncing bubbles of gapminder.org are actually fun to watch!
I have written several papers concerning the possible contribution of heat emitted by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft. Doubtless I’ll write some more.
But those RTGs used for space missions number only a handful, and with the exception of those that fell back to the Earth (and were safely recovered) they are all a safe distance away (a very long way away indeed) from the Earth.
However, RTGs were also used here on the ground. In fact, according to a report I just finished reading, a ridiculously high number of them, some 1500, were deployed by the former Soviet Union to power remote lighthouses, navigation beacons, meteorological stations, and who knows what else. These installations are unguarded, and the RTGs themselves are not tamper-proof. Many have ended up in the hands of scrap metal scavengers (some of whom actually died after receiving a lethal dose of radiation), some sank to the bottom of the sea, some remain exposed to the elements with their radioactive core compromised. Worse yet, unlike their counterparts in the US space program which used plutonium, these RTGs use strontium-90 as their power source; strontium is absorbed by the body more readily than plutonium, so my guess is, exposure to strontium is even more hazardous than exposure to plutonium.
The report is a few years old, so perhaps things improved since a little. Or, perhaps they have gotten worse… who knows how many radioactive power sources have since found their way into unauthorized hands.
Here’s a useful unit of measure that I just found out about, thanks to Bruce Schneier’s security blog: it’s called a micromort, a one-in-a-million probability of death. Curiously, according to the Wikipedia, your chances of dying on a train due to an accident are the same as your chances of dying due to cosmic radiation received while flying on a jet: 1 micromort every six thousand miles.
Earlier this week Egypt, a country of 80 million, collectively left the Internet.
I think this, more than anything, demonstrates that the days (if not the hours) of Mubarak’s regime are numbered. The damage this step causes to the Egyptian economy are likely quite considerable. And a number of other countries are worried: it appears that a significant share of the data traffic between Europe and Gulf oil states, as well as Asia, passes through Egypt. This connections aren’t yet affected, but who knows what happens next?
We live in interesting times.
The other day, I saw a report on the CBC about increasingly sophisticated methods thieves use to steal credit and bank card numbers. They showed, for instance, how a thief can easily grab a store card reader when the clerk is not looking, replacing it with a modified reader that steals card numbers and PIN codes.
That such thefts can happen in the first place, however, I attribute to the criminal negligence of the financial institutions involved. There is no question about it, when it’s important to a corporation, they certainly find ways to implement cryptographically secure methods to deny access by unauthorized equipment. Such technology has been in use by cable companies for many years already, making it very difficult to use unauthorized equipment to view cable TV. So how hard can it be to incorporate strong cryptographic authentication into bank card reader terminals, and why do banks not do it?
The other topic of the report was the use of insecure (they didn’t call it insecure but that’s what it is) RFID technology on some newer credit cards, the information from which can be stolen in a split second by a thief that just stands or sits next to you in a crowded mall. The use of such technology on supposedly “secure” new electronic credit cards is both incomprehensible and inexcusable. But, I am sure the technical consultant who recommended this technology to the banks in some bloated report full of flowery prose and multisyllable jargon received a nice paycheck.
The founder of Wikileaks has been charged with rape in Sweden. As of this morning, his whereabouts are unknown.
Are these charges true? Is Assange a rapist? Perhaps. He is certainly a weird fellow, and for all I know, he’s not necessarily weird purely in a good sense.
But… are these charges true? He pissed off a lot of people, and not just people, but some of the most powerful institutions in the world, including the US and other governments, corporations, and even shady entities like the Church of Scientology. Just how far are governments (and non-governments) willing to go to get rid of him? Are they capable of theatrical dirty tricks? At one time I would have said no. But that was at a time when I could not have imagined that a modern-day government would poison a former agent on foreign soil, using an exotic radioactive substance. At that time, I could not have imagined that a modern-day democratic government would engage in a systematic campaign of lies and deception to justify an unjust war of aggression. Compared to such things, a trumped-up charge against a (to them, very) annoying individual is nothing. Perhaps he should be grateful that he’s still alive and he’s not setting off any Geiger-counters nearby.
Update: And now, a few hours after I wrote the paragraphs above, here’s breaking news from CNN: “WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘no longer wanted’ and not a rape suspect, Swedish prosecutor says on website”. Sooo… What was this all about?
It’s not for the first time I said this, but you just gotta love this Internet thing. The big news this morning of course is the leak of some 90,000 classified US military documents from Afghanistan. Guardians of state and military secrets are horrified: troops’ lives will be at risk, they say. What they should recognize is that the fact that we live in an open society, far from being a weakness, is really our greatest strength. Open discussion of the pros and cons, the successes and failures, the risks and possible outcomes of a war is part of living in a liberal democracy.
As to the release itself, it’s funny how times are changing. When I learned the database language SQL ages ago, it was because I make my living as a computer professional. I did not necessarily expect to use my SQL skills in scientific endeavors, but that, too, came to pass when I began using the wonderfully crafted SQL-based query interface of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. What I certainly never expected is that one day, a journalistic leak will arrive in a variety of formats, perhaps the most useful of which is an SQL dump. I wonder: do they teach the building of SELECT queries in journalism school these days?
His official biography says that he has a degree in Economics and Political Science, that he is a pilot, obtained a Master of Defence Studies degree, and was promoted to colonel just last year. Oh, and he and his wife love golf. Now this distinguished career soldier can add another item to his resume: two-count suspected sex murderer.
I don’t usually get too worked up about stories of violent crime, but even I was shocked when I learned that the suspect in the recent disappearance and death of a Belleville woman whose body was just found by police is, in fact, a high ranking military officer, a colonel, the commander of the Canadian Forces base in Trenton.
Eek.
The terrorists have won. We might as well all change religion right now, pledge our faith in Allah and His Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him), denounce reason, clad our women in burkas, and start learning all the Suras of the Koran.
All it takes is one disruptive passenger to keep a planeload of people stuffed in an airplane for hours, while idiotic security officers lay out all their luggage on the tarmac and do whatever else it is that they do, all the while treating free citizens as potential enemies. Meanwhile, 24-hour news channels provide uninterrupted coverage of the poor airplane sitting at a remote corner of an airfield as if this was the most important event happening on this planet.
The terrorists wanted to frighten me and they succeeded… I am terrified, actually. But no, I’m not terrified of madmen trying to blow up my plane (it might happen, but the probability remains extremely low), what I am terrified of is uniformed guardians of our collective safety and security taking away my rights and my liberty, a threat I have to face every time I go near an airplane.
Twenty-three years ago, I escaped from Communism. I thought I was seeking political asylum. I didn’t realize that I’d end up in an insane asylum. What can I say… the Commies tried to warn me, I just didn’t listen.
I found a Christmas message in my Gmail mailbox today, announcing that they have done “something a little different” this year. I clicked on the link out of curiosity; I expected some sort of lame attempt at holiday humor. Instead, I found an announcement from Google: a donation of $20 million to various charities, as a Christmas gift to all.
It’s black cat day again. I love (black) cats.
One thing I like a lot less is daylight savings time. It’s unnecessary and annoying. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just tell everyone to get up an hour earlier (or later) if it saves some energy? And I’m not even sure that it does.
