Curiosity landed on Mars and its first image was returned successfully.
Yippie!
Aug 062012
Aug 052012
Julian Assange might be a weird fellow, but until now, I had no reason to distrust Wikileaks.
But that was before Wikileaks concocted up a fake New York Times article, combined with a spoofed PAYPAL official blog site to back it up.
Now I regret having sent them money once. My respect for them was based on their perceived moral authority, taking considerably risks for the sake of public transparency. But apparently, their high moral standards apply only to others, not to themselves.
Aug 042012
I admit I read Ayn Rand’s
magnum opus from cover to cover several years ago. I may not be an adoring fan, but… I get Ayn Rand. I think I understand her and I certainly appreciate her message.
She was trying to create an intelligent ideological counterpoint to radical collectivism. Her novels always suffered from heavy-handed, preachy writing; it’s sometimes hard to decide if the author meant what she wrote or if it was a clumsy attempt at satire. Still, the message of Atlas Shrugged is not to be shrugged off (pun intended). It is a magnificent defense of free market capitalism, enlightened selfishness as the driving motor of a successful society, but dragged down by collectivism, entitlements, corrupt politics and lobbying.
One thing Atlas Shrugged doesn’t represent is populism. In fact, it is the antithesis of populism. Which is why I found it ironic that some of the support for the recent movie adaptation came from neo-conservative circles such as the Tea Party. Perhaps they don’t realize that their views are almost as contrary to Ayn Rand’s teachings as the presumed “socialism” of Barack Obama. Ayn Rand’s enlightened capitalist heroes are not ignoring facts that they find inconvenient. They aren’t advocating off-loading hidden (e.g., environmental) costs onto the rest of society. They simply do not believe that anyone has a right to demand their self-sacrifice. They do not owe anything to society. They have a right to what they own: their assets and their ideas. Okay, Ayn Rand sometimes took it a bit too far; some of her heros, after all, turn to overt terrorism in order to defend their ownership rights.
Anyhow, I just finished watching Atlas Shrugged Part I, courtesy of Netflix. It’s not a great movie by any means, but it was better than I expected. As a matter of fact, it was less preachy than Ayn Rand’s book, which certainly helped. I am not sure I approve of the idea of moving the story’s setting to the near future. Ayn Rand’s original story had a sense of timelessness. Keeping its timeframe ambiguous, but with a kind of 1950s, early 1960s atmosphere also could have helped avoid a somewhat artificial explanation behind the importance of railroads. Still, the rewrite wasn’t clumsily done, and I am actually looking forward to the sequel, if it is actually produced. (Supposedly, it is in the works.)
Yes, I am looking forward to watching Atlas Shrugged, Part 2… even as I am rooting for Obama’s re-election. Does this mean that I am delusional?
Aug 022012
Congratulations to Mariam Sultana, reportedly Pakistan’s first PhD in astrophysics. (Or in the subfield of extragalactic astrophysics, according to another news site. Either way, it’s a laudable achievement.)
I knew women scientists have an especially difficult time in very conservative Muslim countries.
I didn’t know astrophysicists (presumably, both male and female) had to pass an extra hurdle: apparently, illiterate Islamists don’t know the difference between astrophysics and astrology. The practice of astrology, like other forms of fortune telling, is considered haraam, a sin against Allah.
Am I ever so glad that I live in an enlightened, secular country.
One of Dr. Sultana’s (I am boldly assuming that Sultana is her last name, though I am well aware that Pakistani naming conventions do not necessarily follow Western traditions) examiners was James Binney, whose name is well known to anyone involved with galactic astrophysics; the book colloquially known as “Binney and Tremaine” (the real title is Galactic Dynamics) is considered one of the field’s “bibles”. (Darn, I hope no religious fanatic misconstrues the meaning of “bible” in the preceding sentence!)
I wish Dr. Sultana the brightest career. Who knows, maybe I’ll run into her one day somewhere, perhaps at the Perimeter Institute.
Aug 022012
I just finished reading a very interesting Vanity Fair article about the decline of Microsoft. It paints a devastating picture leaving one to wonder why Microsoft’s shareholders continue to tolerate Ballmer’s (mis)management.
I have been wondering the same thing for many years, for pretty much the same reasons mentioned in this article: the Vista fiasco, the squandering away of the IE lead, Windows CE and Windows Phone, the Zune misstep, and last but not least, the disaster that is yet to happen, which is called Windows 8.
Think about it: how often did you type “google.com” into a browser lately? How about “facebook.com”? Or “twitter.com”? Or “amazon.com”?
And how many times did you type “microsoft.com”?
And I actually happen to like Microsoft.
The Comments section is also interesting, but mainly because of the bias and misinformation. My all time favorite: the story about how Word became the dominant office product because of “secret APIs”. Perhaps there were secret APIs, perhaps there weren’t. But none of that had anything to do with the then market leader, WordPerfect, jumping on the Windows bandwagon several years late, and with a crappy product that crashed even more often than Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0. And by that time, Microsoft was up to version 4.x and frequent crashes were no longer considered acceptable.
Aug 012012
From time to time, I receive e-mails from complete strangers, often written in a foreign language, advising me not to open some scam e-mail that was sent in the sender’s name. The only problem is, I don’t know the sender, I don’t even know the language, and I certainly never received any scam e-mails from them in the first place. So why are they e-mailing me now?
I think I can guess. I suspect the sender is one of those people who puts everyone’s e-mail address in their contact list. Perhaps there was indeed a scam e-mail sent in the sender’s name and the sender became concerned that the scam may have been sent to all his contact addresses. So he decided to send this warning to everyone in his contact list, including people who never heard of him.
It still does not explain why the Spanish-language message I received today was sent in triplicate. But three copies was sufficient to earn this sender an entry in my spam blacklist. Sorry about that but my patience has run out.
Jul 302012
There is a little bit of a firestorm brewing on Twitter. A journalist, Guy Adams, wrote a critical comment on NBC and made the mistake of including the corporate e-mail of an NBC mandarin. NBC decided to be heavy handed about it and asked Twitter to suspend @GuyAdams. The result is predictable: a flood of messages with the hashtags #nbcfail and #twitterfail.
Now Twitter tends to have this handy little widget about Trends. And the two things I did not see in Trends was, you guessed it: #nbcfail and #twitterfail. One almost has to wonder if the Trends widget contains not what Twitter’s users find interesting but what Twitter’s corporate (or political?) masters allow…
But just before I began my journey down the rabbit hole into the surrealist realm of conspiracy theories, I thankfully refreshed the Twitter page. Guess what? Now #nbcfail is the fifth item in Trends. Phew!
Jul 302012
I read about it in a Hungarian political blog, so I gave it a try: I entered the word “kurvák” (Hungarian for “whores”) into Google.
The first hit is the Web site of Hungary’s governing party, Fidesz.
The second hit is the Web site of the Catholic Church in Hungary.
Is this a failure (feature?) of Google’s algorithms or is it a not so subtle message from Google’s (or Google Hungary’s) people?
Perhaps it’s the former. After all, the other day Google had trouble loading people:
Jul 282012
I first read Mervyn Peake’s astonishing Gormenghast trilogy years ago, shortly after I discovered the eponymous 4-part BBC miniseries, shown back-to-back one late night on Canada’s SPACE channel.
It was a case of instant love. The book is one of my all-time favorites.
Now I re-read the trilogy, in all its glorious 1000+ pages. Gormenghast is a unique book, genre-defying. It is a Gothic novel without ghosts or much by the way of horror. It also turns into a genuine science-fiction story, but in which the futuristic background is just that, a background, a vehicle for storytelling, nothing more. It has humor and tragedy, even macabre comedy in unexpected places. It is also surreal; the castle Gormenghast may be on this Earth but it probably isn’t, it may exist in the present but it probably doesn’t. In fact, at one point I began wondering if it actually may be hiding somewhere in the near infinite landscape of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Its monsters are thoroughly human and its heroes are flawed. Its language is very rich… indeed, from time to time, I paused occasionally and re-read a sentence or two (or three or four) aloud, just enjoying the words.
Somewhere I once read that Gormenghast is The Lord of the Rings for adults, and there is some truth to that, although Gormenghast is not really a fantasy story at all.
The saddest part is that Gormenghast is unfinished. The author was already struggling with a debilitating case of Parkinson’s disease while writing the third novel; the fourth was never written, only some barely legible scraps remain, written in shaky, undecipherable handwriting.
But now, the fourth book (a version of it anyway) is out there after all. It was Peake’s widow (who worked closely with his husband throughout the writing of the trilogy) who took it upon herself to finish the novel. Sadly, she also died but her notebooks were found, and the family decided to publish the result. I just ordered the soon to be available paperback version. I don’t know what to expect… posthumous sequels are often disappointing, but there are exceptions.
Jul 282012
I am so not into sports. But the Olympic opening ceremony is something else. It can be spectacular, it can be inspiring even, and these adjectives certainly applied yesterday.
Except for the way it was presented on CTV to Canadian viewers.
I missed the first 15 minutes of the original broadcast, so by the time I started watching, most of the huge smokestacks were already standing. No problem, I thought: I quickly checked the TV schedule and sure enough, a repeat broadcast was scheduled later in the evening.
So I waited patiently for the repeat, eager to see how a pastoral landscape transforms itself into an industrial heartland (arguably the most spectacular part of the show). Indeed, the leaders of industry arrived in their Omnibus, Sir Kenneth Brannagh had his speech and then… and then CTV decided to have a commercial break. A really long commercial break. So long, in fact, that by the time they returned to the broadcast, most of the huge smokestacks were already standing.
I was irritated but then I thought, maybe I can watch the video on CTV’s Web site. There is no reason for a Web broadcast not to include those 5-6 minutes even if they do insert commercials.
Guess what: the same 5-6 minutes were missing from the Web video version, too.
This morning, I decided to check again to see if perhaps the missing segment was restored. The site is now different, with many more videos available. Too bad I cannot watch any of them… the Silverlight player employed by CTV just shows a grey rectangle regardless of which browser I use (tried another computer, too). Yes, Microsoft Silverlight. I guess that’s CTV’s way of saying “screw you” to Linux users… But even that does not explain the grey rectangle on Windows.
Boneheadedness from CTV aside (eventually I found the missing segment on YouTube, albeit with some completely inappropriate Russian pop music as a substitute soundtrack), the opening ceremony was amazing. Perhaps not the kind of extravaganza produced in Beijing four years ago, but I actually found this one warmer, closer to the heart. Yes, weird at times (I almost thought I’d see Doctor Who appear at one point, chased by some Daleks, but what did I expect? They are Brits, for crying out loud) yet funny and human. In short, I will remember it. I’ll remember this show (and not for the wrong reasons, like I remember the dancer with the ridiculous glowing belly in Athens in 2004) much more than I remember the Beijing ceremony, however extravagant it might have been.
And now I am watching a bicycle race. One of very few sports that I actually enjoy watching.
Update: CTV’s video player is working again, and the version they currently have on their Web site no longer has that 5-6 minute gap at the beginning of the industrial revolution segment. There is still a brief commercial break but I’m not sure if any footage from the opening ceremony is actually missing.
Jul 262012
Here are some recent gems from my country of birth, all uttered this week by Hungary’s ever so democratic prime minister:
- “[C]ounterrevolutionary attempts are under way in the higher education establishment” – July 24, in a speech to leaders of his party’s youth organization.
- “We hope that it will not be necessary to introduce a new political system in place of democracy, but new economic systems, new concepts are necessary.” – July 26, speaking to the National Association of Entrepreneurs and Employers.
- “Unity is not a matter of intent but a matter of strength. Perhaps there are countries where it doesn’t work this way, for instance in Scandinavia, but such a half-Asian rabble like us can only unite when there is strength. This does not exclude consultations, debate and democracy, but we need a central unity, which can be deduced from the country’s historical experience.” – July 26, as above.
It must be great to know that the future of democracy in Hungary is in such committed, firm hands.
Jul 242012
Today would be the 115th birthday of Amelia Earhart, the pioneer female aviator. Google is celebrating with a Google Doodle, showing Ms. Earhart climbing onto a what appears to be a Lockheed Vega 5B (which is not the same as the famed two-engine Electra 10E in which she disappeared.)
Ms. Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The exact circumstances remain a mystery. At the request of her husband, she was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939, by a California court.
The reason why I looked up her official date of death was that I came across “the official Website” of Ms. Earhart. I put this in quotes because I found it odd that a person who disappeared 75 years ago can have an “official Website”, but then, what do I know? So I went and looked to see what the site was. While the site’s stated purpose is “to honor the life, the legend and the career of Amelia Earhart”, it is fairly evident that the real goal is to market the Earhart brand. Indeed, in the Site Purpose section, they warn would be users with stern language: “Any use of the name, image or likeness of Amelia Earhart , without the express written consent of the estate is strictly prohibited.”
Now I know precious little about personality rights in the United States, but I found this warning curious. Be it far from me to pick a fight with lawyers, but exactly who are these people doing the prohibiting, and on what grounds?
The site is marked “© Family of Amelia Earhart”, but the FAQ states that any e-mail sent through this site “goes to the webmaster of CMG Worldwide, the company that represents the name/image/likeness of Amelia Earhart”. So this is a full-fledged marketing operation. Nothing wrong with that (in fact, I appreciate their candor) but that still leaves my question unanswered: exactly what rights do they have to Ms. Earhart’s name?
Well, if Wikipedia can be believed: none. Had Ms. Earhart been domiciled in Indiana at the time of her death, her estate would hold the rights for another 27 years or so. But in California, the personality rights for a celebrity expire after 70 years. So to the best of my knowledge, Ms. Earhart’s likeness and indeed, anything related to her personality, are now in the public domain. (Not necessarily photographs. The copyright status of those may depend on when the photographer died.)
But then it occurred to me to check Ms. Earhart’s site using archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Unsurprisingly, the site has been in existence for many years. Although its visual style changed, much of the text remains the same, including text in the Site Purpose section. And back in 2003 (the date of the earliest version archived by the Wayback Machine) Ms. Earhart’s personality rights would still have been protected under California law.
Meanwhile, Ms. Earhart’s disappearance must remain a mystery for now. The latest expedition to locate her aircraft was called off as it ran into unexpected difficulties.
Jul 232012
Good-bye, Sally Ride. America’s first female astronaut died today, at age 61, after a battle with cancer. When she flew on board Challenger in 1983, Ride was also NASA’s youngest astronaut to have made it to space.
Ride is also known as the only person who publicly supported Roger Boisjoly, the Morton-Thiokol engineer who tried to warn NASA that Challenger was in mortal danger, only to be overruled by his bosses. Boisjoly himself died earlier this year, at age 73.
The world’s first female astronaut, or rather, cosmonaut, is still alive: Valentina Tereshkova is 75 this year, seemingly in good health (judging by her appearance in recent press photographs). May she enjoy many more happy years!
Jul 202012
I completely forgot: four days ago was the 25th anniversary of my arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant. I never had a reason to regret my choice… in fact, politics of the day notwithstanding, I appreciate this country more than ever.
Jul 202012
43 years ago today, the lunar module (nicknamed Eagle) of Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, fulfilling a centuries-old dream of humanity.
Too bad that the 40th anniversary of the last Moon landing is rapidly approaching. That, if you ask me, is four wasted decades of manned space exploration.
Incidentally, the book The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins, was the first English-language book I ever read, sometime in the late 1970s. It was given to me by my aunt (the one who, sadly, is no longer with us) when I complained to her that I was having a hard time improving my English. That particular book, along with several others, was lost when the post office lost a parcel from my Mom. Thanks to Amazon, I managed to replace them all, with one exception: an English-language collection of 11 science-fiction stories that was published in Soviet-era Moscow.
Reading books is a good way to learn a language. My French leaves a lot to be desired (being able to utter a meaningful sentence would be nice) but what little I know I was able to improve by trying to read Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune in French. I first read that book (in Hungarian, of course) at the age of six, in 1969… just as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon.
Jul 202012
I just came across a photograph of a building that looks like one of the abandoned edifices in the ghost city of Prypiat, right next to the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Indeed, the picture appeared in a Facebook blog that features many pictures from Prypiat… but this wasn’t one of them.
Instead, the picture was taken in Hungary, on the south shore of Lake Balaton. The building is an abandoned hotel that before the collapse of Communism served as a resort, owned by the Hungarian Industrial Association. I spent nights at that resort. In particular, I spent nights in this very building shown in the picture.
What I found most striking is that the building looks exactly the same as it did 30-odd years ago (except for the decay, of course). It was apparently never modernized. Never really renovated. Presumably, it was privatized some time after 1989, served as a hotel for a while, and then it was abandoned… but it still looks exactly the same (insofar as I can remember) as it did back in the late 1970s.
I guess I now have a better appreciation of how residents of Prypiat feel when they come across present-day photographs of their once proud town. It is an eerie feeling.
Jul 182012
Having been told by a friend that suddenly, there is a spate of articles online about the Pioneer anomaly, I was ready to curse journalists once I came across the words: “a programmer in Canada, Viktor Toth, heard about the effort and contacted Turyshev. He helped Turyshev create a program …”.
To be clear: I didn’t contact Slava; Slava contacted me. I didn’t “help create a program”; I was already done creating a program (which is why Slava contacted me). And that was the state of things back in 2005. What about all the work that I have done since, in the last seven years? Like developing a crude and then a more refined thermal model, independently developing precision orbit determination code to confirm the existence of the anomaly, collaborating with Slava on several papers including a monster review paper published by Living Reviews in Relativity, helping shape and direct the research that arrived at the present results, and drafting significant chunks of the final two papers that appeared in Physical Review Letters?
But then it turns out that journalists are blameless for a change. They didn’t invent a story out of thin air. They just copied the words from a NASA JPL press release.
And I am still trying to decide if I should feel honored or insulted. But then I am reminding myself that feeling insulted is rarely productive. So I’ll go with feeling honored instead. Having my contribution acknowledged by JPL is an honor, even if they didn’t get the details right.
Jul 172012
Imagine you come across a cult whose leaders, either through malice or ignorance, let their gullible followers consume raw sewage. You might not expect gratitude from the cult proper (fanatics are rarely rational) for revealing the truth, but you may expect society as a whole to applaud your actions.
Not when the cult is the Catholic Church and you are in India. Sanal Edamaruku, founder-president of Rationalist International, president of the Indian Rationalist Organization, was recently invited to investigate a weeping statue of Jesus. He found that the weeping was caused, in fact, by a nearby clogged drain and sewer water seeping through walls through capillary action.
You might think this gentleman should deserve some recognition for having saved possibly thousands of believers from the consequences of consuming sewage (they were licking and consuming Jesus’s “tears”).
No… the Catholic Church, in their infinite wisdom, chose to file a complaint instead under India’s penal code alleging that he hurt the religious sentiments of their community.
No wonder it took these superstitious clowns half a millennium to apologize for Galileo.
Hey, you pompous Pope person, perhaps it’s time to open your pie hole and say something on this matter, reining in your nutty followers? Surely you are not this nutty yourself?
And no, I don’t care one iota if anyone’s religious sentiments are hurt by my present tirade. You have a right (a right I am willing to stand up for) to believe whatever nutty fairy tales you want to believe in, but conversely, I have a right to ridicule your nutty beliefs. At least I have that right here in Canada.
Jul 172012
Paris, the city of light, is also known for its cuisine. Why someone would go to Paris and then choose to eat plastic hamburgers at McDonald’s, I have no idea.
But in case culinary reasons are not sufficient to deter you, consider this: next time you go to a McDonald’s in Paris, they may assault you because they don’t like your electronic eyewear. This is what happened to Steve Mann, a well known University of Toronto engineering professor who is a wearable computing pioneer.
I am guessing that McDonald’s chose not to respond to this gentleman’s complaints and reimburse him for the damages that occurred because they enjoy the free publicity.
Perhaps it’s best to avoid McDonald’s restaurants everywhere, just to be safe?
Jul 172012
If you were reading newspapers, science blogs, or even some articles written by prominent scientists or announcements by prominent institutions (such as Canada’s Perimeter Institute), you might be under the impression that the Higgs boson is a done deal: it has been discovered. (Indeed, Perimeter’s Web site announces on its home page that “[the] Higgs boson has been found”.
Sounds great but it is not true. Let me quote from a recent New Scientist online article: “Although spotted at last, many properties of the new particle – thought to be the Higgs boson, or at least something similar – have yet to be tested. What’s more, the telltale signature it left in the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) does not exactly match what is predicted”.
There, this says it all. We are almost certain that something has been discovered. (This is the 4.9-sigma result). We are not at all certain that it’s the Higgs. It probably is, but there is a significant likelihood that it isn’t, and we will only know for sure one way or another after several more years’ worth of data are collected. At least this is what the experimenters say. And why should you listen to anyone other than the experimenters?