For the first time in years, I was able to add a truly new (to me) programmable calculator to my Web museum: the Casio FM-300. What a delightful find!
Dec 302013
Dec 282013
Our cat Szürke is not only still with us, but his condition continues to improve. This is no small Christmas miracle. Made possible, well, by modern veterinary science and the money spent to pay for it, but also by the caring of veterinarians and their staff at Beechwood Animal Hospital (our “local” vet) and Alta Vista Animal Hospital (where Szürke received numerous transfusions and emergency care.)
Dec 242013
Year after year, as Christmas Eve nears, I recall the Christmas message of Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman. Here is what he said in 1968, 45 years ago: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”
Amen.
Dec 072013
Here are two kittycats, Kifli (left) and Szürke. Szürke is the cat who caused us many a sleepless night in the past two months, with his mysterious anaemia.
The good news is that he is holding steady, now nearly three weeks since his last transfusion. His red blood cell count is still not recovering the way it should, but we may have arrested the loss. My fingers remain firmly crossed.
Hard to believe but back in his heyday, Szürke was significantly heavier than his brother.
Nov 182013
When you have a family member who is gravely ill, you may not have the stamina to pay attention to other things. When you have a family pet that is gravely ill, it’s almost as bad (actually, in some ways it’s worse, as a pet cannot tell what hurts and you cannot explain to the pet why unpleasant medication is necessary or discuss with the pet the available treatment options.)
As I’ve been dealing with a gravely ill cat in the past six weeks, I neglected to pay attention to other things.
I did not add a blog entry on October 31 with my drawing of a Halloween cat.
I did not comment on Remembrance Day. I am very fond of Remembrance Day, because it does not celebrate victory nor does it glorify war; on the contrary, it celebrates sacrifice and laments on the futility of war. This is why I am so unimpressed by the somewhat militantly pacifist “white poppy” campaign; in my view, they completely miss the point. I usually put a stylized poppy in my blog on November 11; not this year, as I spent instead a good portion of that day and the next at the vet.
I most certainly did not comment on that furious (and infuriating) wild hog of a mayor, Toronto’s Rob Ford, or for that matter, the other juicy Canadian political scandal, the Senate expense thing. That despite the fact that for a few days, Canadian news channels were actually exciting to watch (a much welcome distraction in my case), as breaking news from Ottawa was interrupted by breaking news from Toronto or vice versa.
I also did not blog about the continuing shenanigans of Hungary’s political elite, nor the fact that an 80-year old Hungarian writer, Akos Kertesz (not related to Imre Kertesz, the Nobel-laureate) sought, and received, political asylum, having fled Hungary when he became the target of threats and abuse after publishing an article in which he accused Hungarians of being genetically predisposed to subservience.
Nor did I express my concern about the stock market’s recent meteoric rise (the Dow Jones index just hit 16,000) and whether or not it is a bubble waiting to be burst.
And I made no comments about the horrendous typhoon that hit the Philippines, nor did I wonder aloud what Verizon Canada must be thinking these days about their decision to move both their billing and their technical support to that distant country.
Last but certainly not least, I did not write about the physics I am trying to do in my spare time, including my attempts to understand better what it takes for a viable modified gravity theory to agree with laboratory experiments, precision solar system observations, galactic astronomy and cosmological data sets using the same set of assumptions and parameters.
Unfortunately, our cat remains gravely ill. The only good news, if it can be called that, is that yesterday morning, he vomited a little liquid and it was very obviously pink; this strongly suggests that we now know the cause of his anaemia, namely gastrointestinal bleeding. We still don’t know the cause, but now he can get more targeted medication. My fingers remain crossed that his condition is treatable.
Nov 142013
Our cat Szürke remains gravely ill and I don’t know if he will make it.
About two years ago, he was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, a not altogether uncommon disease among older cats. At the time, we opted to treat his condition with medication (Tapazole); the alternative would have been radiological treatment, which works well but would have required him to spend a long time (couple of weeks, we were told at the time) in quarantine.
Szürke has been doing well although lately, he has been losing weight.
Then, on Sunday October 6, he started vomiting. Occasionally throwing up a furball is not exactly a problem with most cats. Vomiting a clear, foamy liquid eight times in an hour is.
The next day, we took Szürke to our local vet who diagnosed him with renal failure, noted that he was dehydrated, and his T4 level was also very low. We discontinued the Tapazole. Even more alarmingly, he was becoming a little anaemic, with a PCV level of 20 (normal, I believe, is between 30 and 50).
We brought Szürke home. He was doing okay, though his appetite was not great. A week later, on October 16, we went back to the vet for a recheck. The vet became very alarmed when Szürke’s PCV level was measured at 15. She immediately recommended that we take him to Alta Vista Animal Hospital, where he would get a transfusion.
Szürke spent two days at Alta Vista. When we brought him home, the diagnosis was still largely unchanged: the anaemia was believed to have been caused by advanced renal failure. The only thing odd was that his renal values were really not that bad. On the other hand, an ultrasound examination showed no other abnormalities that could have been responsible for his condition.
We brought Szürke home on Friday, October 18, with a prescription for Eprex, a subcutaneous injection that was supposed to stimulate his bone marrow and help him produce red blood cells. Szürke got his first injection on Saturday, but we never got to the second two days later, as by that time, Szürke stopped eating altogether. So instead of injecting him, I took him back to Alta Vista.
This time around, Szürke spent four days at the hospital. He received two more transfusions, as his PCV levels dropped to alarmingly low levels (the lowest, I believe, was 7.) On Tuesday, October 22, we actually visited him late at night, thinking that this was probably good-bye.
By this time, however, the diagnosis was different. For starters, a detailed blood test showed that his anaemia is likely regenerative: his reticulocyte count was higher than normal, in fact. I actually viewed this as both a ray of hope and as a message of sorts: if his little body has not yet given up fighting, how can I give up on him?
So the question then, was this: is his regenerative anaemia anemia due to a haemorrhage or haemolysis?
There were no obvious signs of haemorrhage. There was no blood in his vomit or his stool (though my wife and I noticed, and brought to the vet’s attention, that his stools were significantly darker than normal.) So the doctor’s first bet was that the anaemia is haemolytic, due either to an infection or an autoimmune condition. A biopsy was non-conclusive but it indicated a possible minor gastrointestinal infection. Still, the doctors were leaning towards an autoimmune condition as a more likely explanation.
I brought Szürke home on the 25th of October, with prescriptions for Prednisone, Omeprazole, potassium gluconate, Metronidazole and Sulcrate. He was also back on Tapazole, albeit at a much reduced dose. His PCV level after his last transfusion was 17. Yet three days later, when I took him back for a recheck appointment, his PCV was down to 12. At this time, after discussions with the doctor, we opted to discontinue to the Tapazole altogether, betting on the possibility that the autoimmune response was due to sensitivity to this medication. The Sulcrate was also discontinued (he responded very badly to my attempts to administer this liquid medication.) On the other hand, he began receiving cyclosporine in liquid form.
Nonetheless the next day, his PCV levels were further down, to 10, and he was vomiting, so I took him back to Alta Vista for his fourth transfusion. With his PCV back at 13, I brought him home. Two days later, on October 31, we went for a recheck and, surprise: his PCV was up to 17! Finally, some real hope, we thought. Also at this time, the liquid cyclosporin was discontinued in favor of a capsule, which was much easier to administer.
We were okay for a few days. The next visit was on Friday, November 4. By then, Szürke’s PCV was up to 20! However, his T4 levels were going through the roof, due to his untreated thyroid condition. On the vet’s advice, we began to give him an appetite stimulant (Mirtazapine) in the hope that this will be sufficient to make him eat a special, low-iodine diet (Hill’s Y/D) which would allow us to control his thyroid without medication.
For a few days, all seemed to go well but then his appetite dropped, despite the Mirtazapine. On November 11, I took Szürke to our local vet, who checked his PCV: a disastrous 11. I immediately discontinued the Y/D diet and started giving him whatever he liked… the thinking was that if these were to be his last few days on Earth, I won’t try to starve him with food he wouldn’t eat, and if there is still hope, the thyorid is a long-term concern, whereas the anaemia can kill him in days.
The next day, I discussed all this with the vet at Alta Vista who suggested another possible treatment: Chlorambucil (medication so dangerous, I’m advised to wear rubber gloves when handling the capsules. Scary.) The vet also reluctantly recommend another transfusion. By the time we got to Alta Vista, Szürke’s PCV was down to 9. When I brought him home very late at night, it was back to 12 as a result of the transfusion.
That was two days ago. Szürke is home today, and seemingly doing well. But that has always been the case; even when he was weak as a kitten, his happy disposition never changed, he never ceased being playful, never even stopped grooming himself.
He is eating moderately well. He is interested in the world around him. He is still accepting his medications without too much trouble.
But we still don’t really know what on Earth is wrong with him in the first place. So we are left with taking things one day at a time. I have no idea what tomorrow will bring.
Nov 072013
I have been collaborating with John Moffat on his modified gravity theory and other topics since 2007. It has been an immensely rewarding experience.
John is a theoretical physicist who has been active for sixty years. During his amazingly long career, John met just about every one of the iconic figures of 20th century physics. He visited Erwin Schrödinger in a house where Schrödinger lived with his wife and his mistress. He was mentored by Niels Bohr. He studied under Fred Hoyle (the astronomer who coined the term “Big Bang”). He worked under Paul Dirac. He shared office space with Peter Higgs. He took Wolfgang Pauli out for a wet lunch on university funds. He met Feynman, Oppenheimer, and many others. The one iconic physicist Moffat did not meet in person was Albert Einstein; however, Einstein still played a pivotal role in his career, answering letters written to him by a young John Moffat (then earning money as a struggling artist) encouraging him to continue his studies of physics.
Though retired, John remains active as a member of the prestigious Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. I don’t expect him to run out of maverick ideas anytime soon. Rare among physicists his age, John’s knowledge of the science is completely up-to-date, as is his knowledge of the tools of the trade. I’ve seen physicists 20 years his junior struggling with hand-written transparencies (remember those, and the unwieldy projectors?) even as John was putting the finishing touches to his latest PowerPoint presentation on his brand new laptop or making corrections to a LaTeX manuscript.
More recently, John began to write for a broader audience. He already published two excellent books. His first, Reinventing Gravity, describes John’s struggle to create a viable alternative to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, a new gravity theory that would explain mysteries such as the rotation of galaxies without resorting to the dark matter hypothesis. John’s second book, Einstein Wrote Back, is a personal memoir, detailing his amazing life as a physicist.
John’s third book, which is about to be published, is perhaps his most ambitious book project yet. Cracking the Particle Code, published by the prestigious Oxford University Press, is about the decades of research in particle physics that resulted in the recent discovery of what is believed to be the elusive Higgs boson, and John’s attempts to explore theoretical alternatives that might make the Higgs boson hypothesis unnecessary, and provide alternative explanations for the particle observed by the Large Hadron Collider.
I had the good fortune of being able to read the manuscript earlier this year. My first reaction was that John took up an almost impossible task. As many notable physicists, including Einstein, observed, quantum physics is harder, perhaps much harder, than relativity theory. The modern Standard Model of particle physics combines the often arcane rules of quantum field theory with a venerable zoo of particles (12 fermions and their respective antiparticles, four vector bosons, eight gluons and, last but not least, the Higgs boson). Though the theory is immensely successful, it is unsatisfying in many ways, not the least because it fails to account for perhaps the most fundamental interaction of all: gravity. And its predictions, while exact, are very difficult to comprehend even for trained theorists. Reducing data on billions of collisions in a large accelerator to definitive statements about, say, the spin and parity of a newly observed particle is a daunting challenge.
Explaining all this in a form that is accessible to the interested but non-professional reader is the task that John set out to tackle. His text mixes a personal narrative with scientific explanations of these difficult topics. To be sure, the technical part of the text is not an easy read. This is not John’s fault; the topic is very difficult to understand unless you are willing to invest the time and effort to study the mathematics. But John’s personal insights perhaps make the book enjoyable even to those who choose to skip over the more technical paragraphs.
There are two points in particular that I’d like to mention in praise. First, John’s book is amazingly up-to-date; as late as a few weeks ago, John was still making small corrections during the copy editing process to ensure that everything he says is consistent with the latest results from CERN. Second, John’s narrative always makes a clear distinction between standard physics (i.e., the “consensus”) and his own notions. While John is clearly passionate about his ideas, he never forgets the old adage attributed to the late US Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan: John knows that he is only entitled to his own opinions, he is not entitled to his own facts, and this is true even if the facts invalidate a theoretical proposal.
I hope John’s latest book sells well. I hope others will enjoy it as much as I did. I certainly recommend it wholeheartedly.
Oct 312013
I just spent a small
Fortune at the vet,
And all I got to bring home
Is this lousy cat.
Our cat Szürke’s packed cell volume (PCV) is up this morning. A ray of hope. Dare we hope? Or is it just that roller coaster thing again, and his PCV might come crashing down over the weekend, as it did before? If that happens, we’re really out of options.
Oct 302013
My wife took the #7 bus yesterday on her way home from the Byward Market.
The bus had to take a detour, due to the ongoing construction on Rideau street.
Then it had to take a further detour, perhaps due to the construction, maybe some other reason (an accident?)
When I spoke to her, the bus was standing still on Chapel street, heading in the wrong direction.
Some 20 minutes later, when the bus was already on Laurier, I turned on continuous GPS tracking of her phone. Tracking information was collected roughly every minute.
All in all, it took her approximately 45 minutes to get home from the intersection of Chapel and Wilbrod streets.
According to Google Maps, the distance is 950 meters on foot, and it would have take 12 minutes to get home walking. Unfortunately, she had some heavy bags with her so walking was not really an option. Although, had she known what was about to happen, she could have gotten off the bus at Besserer and Chapel, only a 700 meter walk from home.
Construction season is so much fun.
Oct 232013
Our second oldest cat, Szürke (his name means gray in Hungarian, as he is a gray tabby; but we often just call him Süsü, which means something like silly, because he’s a silly little lapcat), is gravely ill. (As is my bank account as a result of the veterinary expenses, but that is another story.)
Trouble is, we don’t know what’s wrong with him.
He has hyperthyroidism, that much we know; he has been getting medication for that for a couple of years already.
But most recently, he became severely anemic. The doctors at first suspected renal failure. But that does not seem to be the case. The problem is more acute, perhaps some gastrointestinal bleeding. Yet still, there is no obvious cause, hence no obvious treatment.
His red cell count keeps dropping. We visited him tonight in the veterinary hospital. We are prepared for the possibility that this was good-bye.
But we have not yet given up hope.
Sep 122013
Here is a sight I have not seen since July 30:
Route results for 199.166.252.0/24 from Vienna, Austria
BGP routing table entry for 199.166.252.0/24
Paths: (4 available, best #1)
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal, best
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
1239 577
AS-path translation: { AS1239 BELL-AS }
edge3.Frankfurt1 (metric 13114)
Origin IGP, metric 100000, localpref 86, valid, internal
Community: Europe Lclprf_86 Germany Level3_Peer Frankfurt
Originator: edge3.Frankfurt1
This is a valid routing table entry for my class C address space at a randomly picked backbone router somewhere on the Internet.
On July 30, Verizon Canada disconnected me. Or rather, they decommissioned the point-of-presence equipment that was utilized by my Internet connection, without moving all their customers first to another POP.
When Verizon proved unable to restore my connection after 10 (!) days, I canceled my contract with them. Meanwhile, my sites’ continuing existence on the Internet was maintained using a backup cable modem connection.
But, as of today, I once again have a functioning DSL connection, courtesy of Bell Canada. Better yet, they were actually able to set up everything properly, including my special request for routing for my portable class C address space. Needless to say, I am very pleased.
And their service costs a lot less than Verizon Canada’s.
Sep 082013
Bittersweet, or solanum dulcamara, is a species of vine. According to my wife the gardener, it was a vine of this species that climbed up a light pole just outside our house a few years ago.
Bittersweet is actually considered an invasive weed in North America, and for a good reason. Just look at the picture below… the vines climbed all the way to the top, completely engulfing the concrete light pole.
We decided to call this thing Shrek. The name was inspired not so much by the animated character but by a New Zealand sheep named after it, which avoided being caught and shorn for six years.
Alas, our Shrek has also been caught and shorn. The City of Ottawa had enough of it (and with good reason, considering the damage it likely did to the concrete light pole, not to mention the increased surface area which may very well cause the light pole to topple in a windstorm.) A few weeks ago, a city crew appeared and cut Shrek at the roots. This is what Shrek looked like as a result last week:
Of course, we hope that Shrek will grow back eventually. That light pole just wouldn’t look the same without it.
Meanwhile, though, it’d be nice if the city opted to finish the job and remove the now dead remains of the plant from its light pole. Or maybe they hope that winter weather will do the trick?
Sep 072013
We used to have a cat named Tarka. (It’s a Hungarian word for mottled, spotted, etc.) She showed up at our doorstep in 1999. Winter was just around the corner, the cat was obviously not doing well outside, and no-one was looking for her… so one day, we let her in.
Tarka was “not a very polite cat,” as a neighbor described her one day. Her characteristic sounds were hissing and howling, especially at other cats.
One such other cat was Bill, another stray that showed up in the neighborhood. Eventually, Bill was adopted by some people across the street, but in the winter of 1999/2000, Bill was still an outdoor cat who occasionally showed up on the small deck just outside our kitchen glass sliding door.
One morning, Tarka noticed Bill outside and she began howling. My video camera (yes, it was that long ago) was handy, so I started taping. The concert went on for several minutes until Bill got bored and left. But not before our other cat, Marzipan, showed up on the scene, no doubt wondering what this racket was all about.
Sadly, none of these cats are around anymore. The first one to leave us was Marzipan; ten months after this video was made, lymphoma killed him. Tarka stayed with us for another 11 years, until her ailing kidneys took her away. She mellowed as she aged, but she never really became what I would call a “polite” cat. And Bill spent 13 years with the family that adopted him before he, too, died earlier this year.
We have several other cats, who will hopefully stay with us for a long time. But I doubt we’ll ever have another cat as unique as Tarka was.
Sep 072013
After spending a week in Hungary earlier this year, on my way back I stopped in London for three days. London is one of my favorite cities, and I haven’t spent any time there in years. My plan to enjoy myself was simple: get an Oyster card, take the Underground to random places, walk.
A few days before, still in Budapest, I badly twisted an ankle. Still, even this did not deter me, although it did slow me down; occasionally, I felt the need to sit down and rest my aching and swelling foot a little.
That’s precisely what happened one early evening in central London, where I found a tiny little park tucked in between two large office buildings near the Thames. Despite the fact that I was in the center of a world metropolis, it was eerily quiet in this spot, except for the loud singing of birds.
As soon as I sat down, I spotted a bunch of pigeons eating some crumbs from the pavement and occasionally fighting each other off. It was fascinating. My phone was with me, so I started capturing the scene on video.
Don’t expect anything spectacular. Just a bunch of pigeons living their lives in a big city. I don’t even like pigeons; many believe that they are flying rats, and I think they have a point. Still… these guys were funny. And the surrealist quiet of the spot I found right in the heart of a big city created an atmosphere that I will forever remember.
Sep 062013
Two days ago, a woodpecker appeared on our linden tree. By the time I managed to grab my phone, it was gone.
Today, the bird reappeared and kindly stayed long enough for me to shoot a few minutes of video.
Nothing exciting here. Just a woodpecker doing what woodpeckers do, on a dead branch of our tree. I just found the bird fascinating, and I found it especially fascinating that a somewhat uncommon bird like this one would appear on a tree in a busy city.
Aug 072013
Visitors to my blog or Web sites may have noticed that in the past week, my Web pages loaded more slowly than usual, and may even have been unavailable at times.
The reason: shortly before noon, July 30, I lost my primary Internet connection.
This connection was via a legacy DSL service (bridged DSL) to a company that used to be UUNet Canada, was purchased by MCI, and eventually, by Verizon, and now does business under the Verizon Canada name.
Yes, the same Verizon that is about to enter the Canadian wireless market, much to the concern of Canada’s “big three”, Bell, Rogers and Telus.
I noticed the service interruption essentially immediately, and reported it to Verizon. First, they suggested that it was a telco problem; indeed, Bell Canada even wanted to send out a technician, but fortunately, I was able to talk them out of this. (The DSL modem was connecting just fine.)
The service was not restored the next day, nor on August 1. But on August 1, I had a long discussion with a Verizon technician. The first thing I learned is that the technician resides in the Philippines. Back in the old days, when I had a technical issue with UUNet Canada, I usually ended up talking to an engineer in their Toronto network operations center, and my issue was resolved in minutes. Don’t get me wrong, the Philippines technician spoke accent-free English and had a basic level of understanding of the technology; but no real competence and, obviously, no decision-making authority.
What the technician did explain, however, is that Verizon made a colossal screw-up: they decommissioned some of their point-of-presence equipment here in Ottawa without first moving all customers who were still using said equipment. The technician told me that they were scrambling to find a solution, and I’ll be back up and running within a few days.
Well… that was August 1. A long weekend then came and went, but still, no Internet service. So on Tuesday, August 5, I called Verizon Canada. Their main 800 number was answered by a pleasant sounding young lady (an intern, I later learned) but on my first two calls, she managed to connect me to two different voice mailboxes, whereas on the third try, I got disconnected. On the fourth try, she made a real effort to reach someone within the company. She was ready to give up (providing me with an e-mail address instead) but when I told her that I’d rather wait on hold a little longer, she finally managed to get me connected to a senior manager.
This gentleman was friendly and competent enough, and certainly understood and appreciated the severity of my situation. I explained to him that I was already taking steps to switch to Bell Canada as my primary Internet provider. He promised to look into my situation and find a solution. He asked for a day. I asked him to call me this morning, because I wanted to make a decision today, one way or another.
He called indeed at the promised time, but all he could tell me was that he was still waiting for some technical folks to come out of a meeting. Okay, we agreed that he’d call again before 2 PM. He sent an e-mail at 2:09 PM, saying that it would take just a tad longer.
At 3:45 PM, I e-mailed and then called him. No answer. So a few minutes later, it was the end of the line for me: I called and e-mailed again, this time instructing Verizon to terminate my service. I then contacted Bell and asked them to initiate setting up my new account.
Now let’s be clear for a moment: I am not talking about some cheap $20/month wireless contract. I was paying★ a premium, to the tune of several hundred dollars, to Verizon for this service. And I’ve been their customer (with a a short interruption) since way back in 1994. If my experience is indicative of the kind of service Verizon provides, all I can say to people cheering the prospects of Verizon’s entry into the Canadian wireless market is to be careful what they wish for.
It will be a few days before my new service with Bell is up and running. I am sure there will be headaches, but I am hopeful that it won’t be too much of a hassle. Meanwhile, I am relying on a backup service that I set up two years ago with Rogers, when my Verizon service was down for a few days (that time, it was actually Bell’s fault, or so I was told.) This service is a little slower, but at least it works (for now).
★I said “I was paying a premium”, but in the last few months, I really wasn’t. Not my fault… I really tried giving them my money. Earlier this year, Verizon moved their Canadian business customers to their pre-existing Enterprise system that combines billing, online payments, service calls, etc. I dutifully set up my account as instructed and made many attempts to pay. The system accepted my credit card, informed me that my payment was processed, but charges never actually appeared on my credit card account. Last month, I contacted Verizon and after some lengthy phone calls with their billing department, also located in the Philippines, they finally told me that the problem has been found and fixed. Well… no charges appeared on my credit card account yet. Funny thing is, when I check with Verizon, my account there shows no arrears. What can I say? If they don’t want my money… I just hope that if they do come to their senses and collect the outstanding invoice amounts, they don’t actually try to charge me for the month of August… the service, after all, went away on July 30 and it was never restored.
Jul 202013
I spent a part of yesterday afternoon speed-reading Konstantin Kakaes’s new e-book, The Pioneer Detectives. It’s a short book (still well worth the $2.99 Kindle price) but it reads very well and presents a fair picture of our efforts researching the origin of the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft.
Yes, I was one of those “detectives”. (In fact, I still consider myself one, as I don’t believe our job is quite done yet; we still owe the community a detailed account of our research and an update of our Pioneer Anomaly review before we can move on with a clean conscience.) So I have an insider’s view of this very intriguing story.
I had a chance to talk with Kakaes at length when he visited me here in Ottawa last year. Over the years, I learned to be apprehensive when talking to journalists; often, the words they put in your mouth bear little resemblance to what you actually said to them when interviewed. I was relieved that this was not the case now: at no time did I feel compelled to cringe while reading the book.
So I really enjoyed Kakaes’s telling of our story. Indeed, I think I learned a thing or two about presenting a complex subject to a non-specialist audience. Kakaes, an accomplished science journalist, manages to do so without dumbing it down with excessive oversimplifications.
One person whose views may not be as favorable is the original discoverer of the Pioneer anomaly, John Anderson. I am told that Anderson is not fond of our results. Kakaes believes that this is because Anderson is “blinded by his desire to believe in something new, in something unexplained. He wants so badly not to know.” Yes, scientists are people, too, and the prospect that a discovery you made, once thought profound, may just be an engineering fluke is not an easy one to swallow. Kakaes does what a responsible journalist must do: he tries to paint an objective picture, which sometimes includes unflattering bits. Yet I think that John Anderson has more scientific integrity than Kakaes gives him credit for.
And to be perfectly honest, I am also disappointed with our own results. When I first read about the Pioneer anomaly (as an outsider, long before my involvement) it seemed to fit perfectly into the big scheme: namely that perhaps the same physics that was responsible for significant deviations from Einstein’s and Newton’s predictions on cosmological and galactic scales might also be responsible for a small but measurable deviation here in the solar system. This was a fantastic prospect!
Sadly, it was not to be. What once seemed like a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting result has been reduced to a small footnote in the history of gravitational physics. Yet I think that our story is nonetheless intriguing. Kakaes seems to think so, too, judging by his book. A book that I am happy to recommend.
Jun 082013
Today I realized that in the past month, my blog has once again become what blogs were meant to be originally: a write-only medium that nobody reads.
Well, almost. The few people who actually bother to look it up at spinor.info could still read it (and thank you for your interest!) The few people who follow my tweets may have seen my posts. People on Google+ may have seen them as well, but are there still people on Google+?
However, the WordPress plugin that I’ve been using for the last couple of years now to publish my posts automatically on my Facebook page has quit on me. And since I was not usually checking my own Facebook posts, I didn’t even notice that something was amiss, I merely assumed that my Facebook friends were really not that interested in what I had to say.
In reality, my posts never made it to Facebook. The culprit has been one of the stupid “migrations” of the Facebook API (Application Programming Interface), which I foolishly enabled, thus breaking the plugin.
Anyhow, thanks to a helpful hint by the plugin’s developer in a WordPress support forum, I was able to find the cause and fix the problem.
I have yet to figure out why people who develop software on which other people depend, most notably people who develop software libraries that are used by other people’s programs, are so keen on making changes that seemingly serve no useful purpose other than breaking said other people’s programs.
Grumble.
Jun 072013
This beautiful cat belonged to my mother-in-law. I last saw him just a few short weeks ago, when I visited her in the city of Pécs, Hungary.
Sadly, my use of the past tense is justified, as Frici (which was his name) is no more. He passed away today, from what appeared to be a severe urinary tract issue, I was told. He was only about four years old. He was a stray that ended up with my mother-in-law after she lost her previous cat.
Yes, we know that it’s just a cat. Yes, we know that cats who spent some time on the street as strays like Frici are much more likely to acquire an infection, or just suffer the consequences of prolonged malnutrition or dehydration that would eventually shorten their lives. Still… Frici was much too young to pass away, and did not deserve to pass away in pain.
Life, I guess. Cherish every day of it, who knows how many are left.
Jun 022013
This morning, my wife and I attended a very moving ceremony in the memory of my good friend, George Olah, who passed away earlier this year.
George’s daughters decided to dedicate a tree in a public park in Ottawa to their father. A little marble plaque at the foot of the tree bears George’s name, the dates of his birth and death, and the Hungarian word for cheers, “egészségedre”.
A violinist was also present. The sound of a solo violin during a cloudy, rainy day was especially poignant and it helped set a somber mood. At one point, when the violinist was asked to play one of George’s favorite tunes, I was able to capture a few seconds of it with my cell phone.
Yet we also had plenty of laughs. George, after all, was a very happy person and his stories were always delightful. My favorite moment: when one of George’s daughters told us that the city permit would even have allowed them to set up a trampoline, several of us exclaimed, “Why didn’t you?” That is because we all knew that George would have loved something so unconventional.