Society – Page 6 – Spinor Info

Street View and privacy

Computers, Internet, Legal, Society No Responses »

Oct 082009

Google’s Street View has just been introduced in Canada.

Many people consider it a “gross invasion of privacy” that someone can take pictures of their streets and post it on the Internet. “What if they see my car in my driveway?” they scream at the top of their lungs, as if Google broke some long established taboo by photographing a public street.

But wait a minute… are these the same people who readily submit to having their laptops searched, its content, personal and business, examined and scrutinized, just so that customs can catch the occasional pedophile?

For what it’s worth, I couldn’t care less if Google posts photographs of my street or my house. On the other hand, I am so concerned about real invasions of my privacy, I am willing to face the wrath of customs agents by using Bruce Schneier’s method of laptop protection against unwarranted searches.

Curiously, most of the people commenting on Schneier’s article completely misunderstand his point: it’s not that I have anything illicit or shameful on my laptop that I need to hide. That would be easy. It’s that I object to the principle of strangers going through my entire life.

The really scary thing is that so many people, citizens of supposedly free countries, already adopted such a strong police state mentality: rather than looking for a lawful way to maintain their privacy, they are discussing various ways to break the law without getting caught. What I like about Schneier’s method is that it does not involve breaking the law: all my statements to customs agents would be truthful. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished… I’ll likely be harassed more than the smartalec who just creates a hidden partition on his laptop and keeps the visible partition sterile. But, at least I’ll suffer with a clean conscience, whatever good that does.

Sliced bread

Personal, Society No Responses »

Oct 042009

I bought this at our favorite Portuguese bakery the other day:

sliced bread In case it’s not obviously visible from the picture, it’s a sliced loaf of bread… sliced lengthwise, that is.

No, I did not ask for it to be sliced lengthwise. I’d have preferred it to be sliced the conventional way, but unfortunately, I was late to the bakery, and this was the last loaf of their uniquely tasty nine-grain bread that day. So I bought it, and they were kind enough to sell it to me at a discount.

The explanation? “New employee,” I was told. Now why do I have the feeling that this new employee will not be employed at that place very long?

Then again, it could have been worse. She could have sliced it horizontally.

Peter principle

Society No Responses »

Jul 092009

Ever since I first read about the Peter principle, named after the late Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter, it always made sense to me: promoting people based on their competence likely lands them in jobs that exceed their competence level, lowering the overall effectiveness of the organization.

Now we have proof: a new paper on ArXiv (which works fine today, thankfully) shows the results of a computer simulation demonstrating a rapid decrease in efficiency as a result of a competence-based promotion system.

And the Oscars remind me of…

Film, Society No Responses »

Feb 232009

I don’t usually write about things such as the Oscars, as the topic leaves me supremely uninterested. However, it is hard to avoid it if you watch, listen to, or read the news. And I suddenly realized something, one of the reasons why I consider awards like the Oscars so irrelevant.

I probably wasn’t even in grade school yet (my guess is that it was the summer of 1968 and my family was watching the Mexico City Olympics) when I observed that there really are two types of sports. The results of sprinters, jumpers or weightlifters are measured by an objective standard: the reading from a scale, a ruler, or the face of a clock. But others, like gymnasts, are judged entirely differently: by a panel of experts who make subjective judgments of their performance. The ranking of a weightlifter doesn’t depend on which scale was used, as all are calibrated to the same standard; the ranking of a gymnast, on the other hand, depends heavily on the constitution of the panel of judges supervising the competition.

But what bothered me most is not that these differences exist, but that the world of adults did not seem to take notice. Grownups all talked about the Olympic gold of a weightlifter the same way as they did about the gold of a gymnast, as if there was no difference.

My disconnect with the world of grownups began around this time, I think. And, as my misgivings about the Oscars demonstrate, it has not ended.

There are times…

Society No Responses »

Feb 172009

There are times when I wonder if moving to North Korea might be a good idea.

No, I am not altogether serious, but still… in North Korea, they may send you away for half a lifetime of hard labor for looking cross-eyed at a picture of the Dear Leader, but only in Canada can the driver of a passenger vehicle be fined for smoking while carrying a minor… even though, while the officer was writing the ticket, the minor, being a smoker, got out of the car to have a cigarette herself.

No digital dark ages?

Books, Internet, Physics, Society, Technology No Responses »

Jan 272009

I’ve read a lot about the coming “digital dark age”, when much of the written record produced by our digital society will no longer be readable due to changing data formats, obsolete hardware, or deteriorating media.

But perhaps, just perhaps, the opposite is happening. Material that is worth preserving may in fact be more likely to survive, simply because it’ll exist in so many copies.

For instance, I was recently citing two books in a paper: one by d’Alembert, written in 1743, and another by Mach, from 1883. Is it pretentious to cite books that you cannot find at any library within a 500-mile radius?

Not anymore, thanks, in this case, to Google Books:

Jean Le Rond d’ Alembert: Traité de dynamique
Ernst Mach: Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung

And now, extra copies of these books exist on my server, as I downloaded and I am preserving the PDFs. Others may do the same, and the books may survive so long as computers exist, as copies are being made and reproduced all the time.

Sometimes, it’s really nice to live in the digital world.

Are OC Transpo drivers fighting the city or its residents?

Society, Transportation No Responses »

Jan 152009

The union of OC Transpo drivers threatened to picket the city’s Para Transpo service if the city brought in additional drivers to deal with increased demand. Para Transpo is not part of OC Transpo. It is a service for the really needy, disabled people for whom walking is not an option, not even when it’s not -30 below, like this morning. By threatening to picket, the union makes once again crystal clear a point that has been obvious since the beginning: their utmost contempt towards the residents of Ottawa. It is for this reason that I support the city’s unwavering position. The drivers had other options, like work-to-rule. By choosing to go on strike in the middle of winter, by choosing to picket sites such as city hall that have nothing to do with transportation, they’ve made their feelings clear towards the nearly one million residents of the city… if we don’t feel compassionate towards their supposedly just cause, they only have themselves to blame.

New Year’s eyeglasses

Society No Responses »

Jan 122009

I asked a New York friend today, what will they do on Times Square on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2010?

In the 2000’s, every other person on attending the New Year’s Eve celebrations at Times Square was wearing a pair of 2oox party eyeglasses, with the two zeroes in the middle forming the pair. The same thing worked in the 1990’s (the upper halves of the two 9’s serving the same purpose) and even in the 1980’s (again, the upper halves of the 9 and the 8 doing the same thing.) I have no idea about the 1970’s… that was before my time, I came to North America in 1987.

It’ll still work at the end of this year, because 2010 has two zeroes. But… what will happen at the end of 2010? How will they use the number 2011 to create a pair of New Year’s eyeglasses? That’s what I asked my friend.

He asked me in return why I am worried about such things. “I am worried about the future,” I told him, “aren’t you?” “No,” he replied, “not that badly…”

More OC Transpo strike madness

Society, Transportation No Responses »

Dec 112008

Ottawa U. and Carleton U. are running shuttle services to help students get to exams. OC Transpo’s union leaders are now suggesting that they will attempt to picket these services, too. In other words, they’re now openly declaring the citizens of Ottawa their enemy, as opposed to the bus company. What next, blocking private cars, too? Locking citizens in their homes, lest they compete with the bus service by trying to walk to work?

The more they do this, the less sympathetic I feel towards the strikers, and the more I hope that the city will have the guts to stand firm and wait until the union runs out of money and stamina.

Transpo strike

Society No Responses »

Dec 102008

So, OC Transpo is going on strike. Yes, I support the principle of collective bargaining. But I don’t support a bunch of selfish unionists who think they can hold a whole city hostage by taking things to the bring and beyond. The strike doesn’t bother me personally… if anything, I am looking forward to quieter mornings. But the fact that they do this just weeks before Christmas and during a snowstorm speaks volumes. And it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer. If there was justice, a student missing an exam or a single mother of three who is unable to go to work tomorrow morning would spit in the face of every OC Transpo employee who voted for the strike.

No wonder I didn’t like communism, I guess.

Security or insanity?

Politics, Society No Responses »

Dec 032008

The usual rule is, things are bound to get worse before they get better. The situation with travel security is no exception. Never mind not being able to take a pair of nail scissors or a bottle of water on board an airplane… Greyhound Canada began to implement airport-style security at bus terminals. This is insane, people! Gruesome as that beheading incident was a few months ago, do you really want to live in a society of people who are officially so afraid of one another, they are not willing to travel together unless none of them carries a corkscrew or a knitting needle?

This is just plain stupid. Dumb. Idiotic. I hope the extra expense will drive Greyhound Canada into bankruptcy.

Hope

Society No Responses »

Nov 192008

New Scientist asked what gifts three time-traveling visitors from the future should bring, if they popped up, say, when the LHC is finally turned on and starts operating. I could not resist the urge to reply. I titled my response “Hope” and wrote:

I would think that three authentic-from-the-future photographs brought by those three visitors would do nicely.

One should bear the image of a happy human in all his imperfect homo sapiens glory, such as a grinning teenager with a pimple on his nose, and no robots, genetically engineered trans-humans, or grey blobs in the background.

The second should show the image of the Earth from space: blue, white, and green in all the right places, pearls of bright cities on the night hemisphere, and nice, not too large, not too small ice caps where those should be.

The third should show another human standing in front of a window on a spaceship. Behind the human, through the window, we see the Milky Way galaxy… from the outside.

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