2012

 Computer Security, Politics, Society  No Responses »
Nov 242011
 

2012 is supposed to be the year when the world comes to an end, courtesy of a stray planet or something. No, this is not something that I worry about, not the least bit.

Yet the world as we know it may still come to an end of sorts. Here are some of the things I do worry about:

  1. Germany is having trouble raising cash. This alarming news may mark the beginning of the end for the Euro, triggering a massive worldwide depression.
  2. A collapse of the Eurozone may trigger a collapse of the Chinese economic bubble. The consequences of an economic depression in China are unimaginable.
  3. Recently, a successful SCADA attack on a water plant in the US was confirmed. Perhaps in 2012 we shall see the first large scale SCADA attack on some essential infrastructure in the United States or Western Europe. How Western governments might respond is anyone’s guess.
  4. Israel may actually commit an act of utmost self-destructive stupidity and attack Iran.

Thankfully, there is one item that I can strike out from my list: it seems increasingly unlikely that one of the tea party fundamentalists would win the Republican nomination in the United States and go on to defeat Barack Obama. Obama may end up a one-term president, but if he is defeated by a Gingrich or a Romney, I’d know that at the very least, an adult remains in charge of the White House.

 Posted by at 5:14 am

And now we’re truly screwed

 Economy, Internet, Politics  No Responses »
Nov 012011
 

Well, if I thought Halloween was bad enough already, I quickly learned the error of my ways this morning, when I found out about the Greek referendum thing. How does a world order unravel? In 1914, all it took was a bullet to pull the first thread. Perhaps in 2011, it’s a boneheaded move by an embattled prime minister of a minor economy within the Eurozone. I have a very, very bad feeling about this.

And Facebook still hates me, not picking up my blog posts unless I reset the link manually every time.

 Posted by at 12:55 pm

Climate skepticism

 Environment, Politics, Weather and Climate  No Responses »
Oct 222011
 

Years ago, I expressed my (informed, I hope) skepticism concerning climate change in the form of several questions. One of these questions has been answered in a very resounding way by a most thorough independent analysis: yes, the warming trend is real and statistically significant.

So then, my questions are:

√ Is global warming real?
• Is it a future trend?
• Is it man-made (caused by CO2 emissions)?
• Is it bad for us?

The fundamental dilemma is that on the one hand, it seems irresponsible to advocate the spending of trillions of dollars (and potentially wrecking an already fragile global economy) before all these questions are answered. On the other hand, by the time we have all the answers, it may be too late to act.

But then, perhaps none of it matters. I do not believe that harebrained schemes like carbon trading are ever going to work. Humanity will continue to burn fossil fuels in ever increasing quantities in the foreseeable future, and atmospheric CO2 will inevitably increase. Ultimately, we may be faced with choices such as geoengineering or simple adaptation: moving from coastal lands to higher ground, evacuating areas that become unsurvivable in the summer, but also taking advantage of longer growing seasons or more fertile areas in the north.

 Posted by at 1:36 pm

Nuclear accident! Everybody panic now!

 Environment, Physics, Politics  1 Response »
Sep 132011
 

Now is the time to panic! At least this was the message I got from CNN yesterday, when it announced the breaking news: an explosion occurred at a French nuclear facility.

I decided to wait for the more sobering details. I didn’t have to wait long, thanks to Nature (the science journal, not mother Nature). They kindly informed me that “[…] the facility has been in operation since 1999. It melts down lightly-irradiated scrap metal […] It also incinerates low-level waste” and, most importantly, that “The review indicates that the specific activity of the waste over a ten-year period is 200×109 Becquerels. For comparison, that’s less than a millionth the radioactivity estimated to have been released by Fukushima […]”

Just to be clear, this is not the amount of radioactivity released by the French site in this accident. This is the total amount of radioactivity processed by this site in 12 years. No radioactivity was released by the accident yesterday.

These facts did not prevent the inevitable: according to Nature, “[t]he local paper Midi Libre is already reporting that several green groups are criticizing the response to the accident.” These must be the same green groups that just won’t be content until we all climbed back up the trees and stopped farting.

Since I mentioned facts, here are two more numbers:

  • Number of people killed by the Fukushima quake: ~16,000 (with a further ~4,000 missing)
  • Number of people killed by the Fukushima nuclear power station meltdowns: 0

All fear nuclear power! Panic now!

 

 Posted by at 3:45 pm

Internet in China

 Economy, Internet, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 292011
 

Using the Internet in China just got a little harder. Not content with operating one of the most heavy-handed Internet censorship regimes in the world, Chinese authorities decided that free Wi-Fi makes it just too easy for all sorts of unsavory electronic communication to take place without appropriate supervision by Big Brother… so they ordered public Wi-Fi access providers to install costly software to record the identities and monitor the Web activities of users.

This is why I am not really afraid that the 21st century will belong to China. Sure, they became an economic giant, but this kind of institutional paranoia is ultimately self-limiting. Now if one day, they suddenly kicked out the Chinese Communist Party and replaced its one-party rule with a pluralist society… but then again, if that were to happen and China became the world’s most populous liberal democracy, why would I need to feel worried about their economic prosperity?

 Posted by at 12:45 pm

Hungarian culture

 Hungary, Politics  1 Response »
Jul 282011
 

Hungary’s ruling party Fidesz, which enjoys a two-thirds parliamentary majority allowing it to tweak the Constitution on a whim, prides itself, among other things, as the true guardian of the nation’s cultural traditions.

The other day, Thomas Melia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the State Department of the United States, told the US House Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia that Hungary’s new constitution, media law, and law on churches are causes for concern.

Tamás Deutsch, a founding member of Fidesz, former government minister (responsible for Youth Affairs and Sports, 1999-2002) and current member of European Parliament responded on Twitter with the following words: “Who the fuck is Thomas Melia? Why do we have to deal with this kind of shit every day?”

How cultured. It must be a proud day for every Hungarian.

 Posted by at 12:56 pm

Debt debate

 Economy, Politics  No Responses »
Jul 282011
 

Here is a picture, shown a few nights ago on Jay Leno’s show, of United States Senate majority leader Harry Reid and minority leader Mitch McConnell. If you can’t easily tell which is which, you are not the only one:

Just how ridiculous is it that a few days before the debt ceiling deadline, they are simply incapable of coming to an agreement? That even though they seem to agree on the basics (the debt-ceiling must be raised, a long-term solution to tackle the deficit problem must be found) gaining a political advantage over their opponent is more important than resolving a crisis that will likely have long-term repercussions not only for the economy of the United States but that of the entire world?

Looking at the recklessness and ineptitude of today’s politicians (and not just in the United States, I don’t want to be an America-basher here) it does make me wonder how long we have before World War Three…

 Posted by at 12:21 pm

Profiling

 Politics, Society  3 Responses »
Jul 232011
 

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.

 Posted by at 2:41 pm

Headshot

 Health, Politics  No Responses »
Jun 122011
 

Gabrielle Giffords is on the mend. It is inspiring. I’d not wish what she had to go through even on my worst enemy. I hope it’s not just morbid curiosity on my part when I wonder, to what extent will she be able to recover in the end? Is her personality, are her mental abilities intact? I hope so, but there are limits to what medical science can do when a lead slug rips through a large chunk of your brain.

 Posted by at 11:18 am

Combine harvesters and GPS

 Communication, Politics, Technology  No Responses »
Jun 092011
 

John Deere, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, would not be the first company to come to mind when I think about a controversial issue related to the Global Positioning System… but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Large, automated farming operations rely heavily on precision (augmented) GPS.

And according to John Deere, it’s precisely those kinds of users who would be most heavily affected by the wireless data network proposed by a company named Lightsquared, permissions for which were mysteriously fast-tracked by the FCC in the United States last fall. Yes, it smelled fishy… On the other hand, the United States is not some corrupt third-world country and I was somewhat skeptical about the dramatic claims of interference. Weren’t radio devices, including GPS receivers, supposed to be equipped with sufficient frequency filters to ensure no interference from neighboring frequency bands, no matter what? Is it really valid to assume that just because a neighboring frequency band is reserved for mobile satellite applications, all transmissions in that band will be low power? Well, John Deere’s material answers my questions in full, and it seems that the concerns are valid, more valid even than initially thought. I wonder how the FCC will respond.

 Posted by at 1:24 pm

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

 Computer Security, Politics  No Responses »
Jun 022011
 

Although the Chinese are protesting loudly, too loudly perhaps, I have no reason to question the credibility of Google’s claim that recent attacks targeted at high-profile Gmail accounts were, in fact, coming from China. As a matter of fact, I can confirm from my own experience that a clear majority of automated ‘bot attacks intercepted by my server originate from Chinese IP addresses (here is a recent small sample of 14 attempts: 5 came from China, 2 from the US, 1 each from Japan, Bulgaria, Thailand, Ecuador, Poland, Singapore and Brazil; a previous data set of 15 attempts included 6 from China and 1 from Hong Kong). Which is why I thought it was high time for the Pentagon to declare publicly that hacking can constitute an act of war.

 Posted by at 1:08 pm

Distant worlds

 Politics, Space  No Responses »
May 312011
 

Neither I nor anyone else alive today would likely see the end of such a mission, but… the possibility that I might live long enough to see just the launch of humanity’s first interstellar space mission is simply awe-inspiring.

Of course it’s highly unlikely that it will happen. Mediocrity and politics will see to it that it won’t. But then… Apollo happened, didn’t it? Sometimes, miracles do occur.

 

 Posted by at 3:45 pm

Preserving data

 Computers, Physics, Politics  No Responses »
May 312011
 

One of the biggest challenges in our research of the Pioneer Anomaly was the recovery of old mission data. It is purely by chance that most of the mission data could be recovered; documents were saved from the dumpster, data was read from deteriorating tapes, old formats were reconstructed using fragmented information. If only there had been a dedicated effort to save all raw mission data, our job would have been much easier.

This is why I am reading it with alarm that there are currently no plans to save all the raw data from the Tevatron. This is really inexcusable. So what if the data are 20 petabytes? In this day and age, even that is not excessive… a petabyte is just over 300 3 TB hard drives, which are the highest capacity drives currently no the market. If I can afford to have more than 0.03 petabytes of storage here in my home office, surely the US Government can find a way to fund the purchase and maintenance of a data storage facility with a few thousand hard drives, in order to preserve knowledge that American taxpayers payed many millions of dollars to build in the first place.

 Posted by at 3:37 pm

Majority

 Canada, Politics  No Responses »
May 032011
 

So they got only 40% of the vote, but Stephen Harper’s conservatives won that much coveted majority in Parliament. I might see it as a strong argument in favor of an improved voting system with runoff elections, if I didn’t know any better; if I didn’t know that representative democracy is always unfair, regardless of the voting system used.

(Case in question: if we had runoff elections in Canada, how many Liberal voters, in ridings where their candidates came in third, would have voted Conservative instead of choosing, say, a former Communist? OK, well, in that particular riding the Communist actually won but chances are that many Liberal votes would have gone to the Conservatives in a Conservative-NDP runoff.)

Then again, a system of runoff elections might make it easier for smaller parties to exist. Right now, there are calls for the Liberals to fold into the NDP. Is that really a good thing? Yet the same thing happened on the right not too many years ago, ending up with a more ideological, more right-wing, but ultimately stronger Conservative party.

Grumble, this gives me a headache. I’ll stick to physics instead. As to Harper, I’m glad he likes cats.

 

 Posted by at 10:59 am

May 1

 Politics  No Responses »
May 022011
 

Here’s a new reason to celebrate May 1: it appears that Osama bin Laden was killed today. (I was wrong, by the way; I was pretty sure that he was killed years ago.) Congratulations are in order to all those who participated in whatever military and intelligence magic it took to make this happen.

 Posted by at 3:53 am

Minority?

 Canada, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 302011
 

If statistics (and those who report them) can be believed, we’re going to end up with little change in Parliament insofar as the Conservatives are concerned… but it’s going to be a victorious day for the NDP. Which wouldn’t make me too unhappy except that I don’t have particularly fond memories of the times when the NDP was governing Ontario. I was called by an NDP activist the other day, and mentioned this. He didn’t argue with my assessment, only mentioned that those were tough economic times. “Why, these aren’t?” asked I, to which he had no response.

 Posted by at 12:18 am
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