Another ‘humane’ society

 Cats, Society  No Responses »
Dec 302011
 

Looks like our experience with the Ottawa Humane Society is indeed not an outlier. There appears to be some outrage over the Arizona Humane Society’s decision to euthanize a recovering addict’s 9-month old injured cat, after he was unable to come up with $400 on the spot. (Ironically, the same Humane Society had no trouble finding the money to hire a professional publicist to deal specifically with this case.)

I understand that shelters, especially municipal shelters, must make unpleasant decisions every day about animals that cannot be rescued or are unadoptable. But these decisions should not be made callously and heartlessly. What is appalling is that in all these cases, there were people able and willing to care for the animal that was killed, but the humane society in question never gave them, or the cat, a chance.

 Posted by at 10:47 am

All of you on the good Earth

 Religion, Society, Space  No Responses »
Dec 242011
 

In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, for the first time in the history of humanity, disappeared behind another celestial body. When they re-emerged on the other side and saw the Earth rise over the lunar landscape, on much of the Earth it was Christmas Day.

And this is when they sent us Earthlings a Christmas message, which ended with the words, “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.”

You don’t need to be religious to find this moment awe-inspiring.

 Posted by at 9:14 am

How many rabbis?

 Religion, Society  No Responses »
Dec 212011
 

It almost sounds like some crude ethnic joke: how many rabbis fit into the basket of a cherry picker?

Lighting the nation's menorah in Washington

And the answer is, well, one fewer if you also include a photographer (who, presumably, is not himself a rabbi).

Happy Hannukah!

 Posted by at 8:19 am

Statistics

 History, Politics  1 Response »
Dec 202011
 

Years ago, when Bush’s stupid war in Iraq began, I started putting some statistics up on my then blog site. Statistics like this one:

  • Number of biological bombs in Iraq, according to Colin Powell: 400,
  • Number of biological bombs found in Iraq: 0,
  • Amount of anthrax in Saddam Hussein’s possession, according to Colin Powell: 16,000 kg,
  • Amount of anthrax found in Iraq: 0 kg,

and so on. Now that the Iraqi war officially came to an end, CNN provided some interesting statistics of their own:

So my question is… was it worth it? Even if we ignore the fact that Iraq may yet become a satellite state of an increasingly powerful Iran and as such, a worse security threat than Saddam Hussein has ever been, his evil sons and chemical attacks on civilians notwithstanding?

 Posted by at 9:19 pm

Fame and notoriety

 History, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 192011
 

An e-mail from someone reminded me that whereas I posted a comment here in my blog on the death on Kim Jong Il, I neglected to comment on the death of Vaclav Havel. Goes to show that notoriety is often a more direct route to greater fame than doing the right thing.

 Posted by at 4:32 pm

Ding dong, the Kim is dead…

 History, Politics  2 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

I know it’s bad form to rejoice upon the death of a human being, but I cannot say that I have any inclination to shed a tear over the death of North Korea’s totalitarian dictator, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il.

 Posted by at 11:16 pm

The Higgs hunt

 Physics  No Responses »
Dec 142011
 

So I am reading details about the on-going search for the Higgs boson at the LHC. The media hailed the announcements this week as evidence that the hunt is nearing its goal… however, this is by no means conclusive, and instinctively, I’d be inclined to come to the opposite conclusion.

The Higgs boson, if exists as predicted, can decay into many things. It can decay into two photons. Just such a decay, consistent with a Higgs particle that is about 130 times heavier than a proton, was in fact observed by two of the LHC’s detectors, CMS:

and Atlas:

So far so good, but these signals are weak, far from conclusive. Never mind, both CMS and Atlas observed another slight peak. A Higgs particle can, in principle, also decay into two Z-bosons. Indeed, such a decay may be indicated by CMS (that ever so small bump near the extreme left of the plot):

and again, Atlas:

And on top of that, there is yet another decay mode, the Higgs particle decaying into a pair of W-bosons, but it is very difficult to see if anything exists at the extreme left of this plot:

So why does this leave me skeptical? Simple. First, we know that the ZZ and WW decay modes are far more likely than the diphoton (γγ) decay.

So naively, I would expect that if the signal is strong enough to produce noticeable bumps in the diphoton plot, very strong peaks should have been observed already in the ZZ and WW graphs. Instead, we see signals there that are even weaker than the bumps in the diphoton plots. While this is by no means rock solid proof that the Higgs does not exist, it makes me feel suspicious. Second… well, suppose that the Higgs does not exist. We always knew that it is the low energy region, namely the region that is still under consideration (the possibility of a Higgs that is heavier than 130 GeV is essentially excluded) where the Higgs search is the most difficult. So if no Higgs exist, this is precisely how we would expect the search to unfold: narrowing down the search window towards lower energies, just as the data becomes noisier and more and more bumps appear that could be misread as a Higgs that’s just not there.

Then again, I could just be whistling in the dark. We won’t know until we know… and that “until” is at least another year’s worth of data that is to be collected at the LHC. Patience, I guess, is a virtue.

 Posted by at 9:02 pm

David Frum

 Politics  2 Responses »
Dec 112011
 

Former Bush speechwriter David “axis of evil” Frum’s name is well known and widely despised among liberals. What is perhaps a little less well known is that he is not exactly well liked these days in conservative circles either. For what it’s worth, I have come to admire his intellectual honesty that led him to write, among other things, the following about present-day conservative media and conservative thinking:

“Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) ‘the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.'”

There is only one observation I’d add to Frum’s comments. The people he speaks of… they’re not “conservatives”. They abandoned conservative ideals when they jumped on the radical right-wing agenda of the tea party movement or started parroting the radical right-wing trash coming from talk show hosts like Limbaugh.

 Posted by at 1:27 pm

Copyright again

 Canada, Intellectual Property, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 032011
 

A while back, I wrote an e-mail to James Moore, Minister of Heritage, expressing my concern that the proposed new copyright legislation (Bill C-32) is going to turn me into a de facto criminal for the mere act of copying legally purchased DVDs to my computer’s hard drive for easy viewing.

Yesterday, much to my surprise, I received a reply. In his reply the Minister explains, among other things, that “copyright owners may decide whether to use technological protection measures for their content and consumers whether to pay for such content”.

In other words, screw me, it’s laissez faire capitalism. (In fact, he’s preaching to the choir: I stopped purchasing software like computer games eons ago because I despise Activation-type technologies.) Except that… our Minister and his government already decided that it is NOT laissez faire capitalism since government intervention (in the form of criminal sanctions, no less!) is required to protect the interests of copyright owners. The Minister’s reply is also representative of this government’s very callous attitude towards culture in general: by stating that “Copyright is a marketplace framework law”, the Minister makes it clear that they see intellectual property only as marketable products, and the consumption of culture as merely a voluntary consumer activity. I wonder if they maintain the same attitude towards, say, food or health care: in the marketplace, after all, consumers have a choice whether or not to purchase foodstuffs, right?

Their plans concerning copyright law was one reason why I did not vote Conservative this time around, and it seems that my concerns were well justified. Now my hope is that as this legislation passes, its ridiculousness will eventually become evident, and either the Supreme Court will step in or a successive government will make the necessary changes.

 Posted by at 9:42 am

CMS

 Internet, Personal  No Responses »
Nov 292011
 

I finally completed the task of moving my personal Web site to a content management system (Joomla!). It turned out to be a much bigger task than I anticipated; a lot of stuff accumulated on my site over the years, and some of it, like my Seas of Mars Java applet, is interactive content and it was a bit of a struggle to make these pages compatible with the CMS code. Still, I’m glad it’s done… my site is my way of introducing myself to the world, and it looks like I’ll be in need of doing some introducing, as some of my long-term clients are slowly leaving the picture.

 Posted by at 4:30 pm

Is BYTE alive again?

 Computers  No Responses »
Nov 262011
 

BYTE was once the most influential computer magazine. I, too, was an avid reader. But the old BYTE is long gone, and an attempt to revive it as a subscription-based service also ended a few years ago.

But now, much to my surprise, I am finding BYTE alive and well again, as a beta site ran by Information Week. How could I have missed this? Even Jerry Pournelle is back, with his venerable Chaos Manor opinion column. Yay!

 Posted by at 4:56 pm

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

All My Love

 Music  No Responses »
Nov 222011
 

For months, a melody was stuck in my head and I just couldn’t identify it. Finally this morning, I suddenly remembered a fragment of its lyrics: “All my love, all my love, all my love to you”, and that was enough for a successful Google search. Of course. It’s All My Love by Led Zeppelin.

Now I know. It’s a darn good song, by the way.

 Posted by at 2:28 pm

Infuriating

 Computers  No Responses »
Nov 212011
 

Operating systems can be so infuriating.

Ages ago, I used to have a CD-changer type CD-ROM drive into which I could load four CD-ROMs, each of which appeared under its own drive letter. This was very convenient, except for one thing: every so often, when a program (usually needlessly) enumerated the drives on my system, Windows insisted on sequentially loading all four disks: clickety-click, buzz-buzz, vrooooom, cli-click, cli-click, swoosh, clack… clickety-click, buzz-buzz, vrooooom, cli-click, cli-click, swoosh, clack… clickety-click, buzz-buzz, vrooooom, cli-click, cli-click, swoosh, clack… clickety-click, buzz-buzz, vrooooom, cli-click, cli-click, swoosh, clack… Yes, I can still hear it in my mind. And while this was taking place, the program in question was usually unresponsive; if the program happened to be Windows Explorer, my entire desktop would stay frozen for a while.

I no longer use this CD changer, but I do use several external hard drives. External hard drives that spin down when not in use, reducing wear and saving energy. But every so often, programs insist on enumerating all drive letters, and guess what… Here we go again. Cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick… cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick… cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick… cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick… cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick… cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick… cli-click, zip, woosh, click-a-tick…

The infuriating bit is that these enumerations are most of the time totally unnecessary. They happen, for instance, when all I am doing is clicking inadvertently on a drop-down containing a list of folders… to list drive letters (not their contents!)

OK. A while back, I promised myself that I’ll never maintain a list of things I hate, as that is one surefire way to become a grumpy old man, and this instance is no exception. So rather than grumble about it, I am now test driving an idea: mounting the drives in question under folder names, instead of assigning them drive letters. I can already see one downside: Western Digital’s helpful little utility, the WD Drive Manager (which I use because it keeps me informed about the drives’ health status) doesn’t really like it when drives do not have letters assigned to them. It’s blinking in the taskbar incessantly. Nonetheless, that may be a small price to pay if I can eliminate the unnecessary drive spinups.

 Posted by at 3:58 pm

Wasn’t the BIOS after all

 Computers, Personal  No Responses »
Nov 202011
 

Last May, when I tried to upgrade a motherboard that had trouble recovering from hibernation under Windows 7, I ran into an unpleasant problem: after the BIOS upgrade, the system refused to boot. No BIOS screen, nothing. I do have a test card that shows POST (BIOS diagnostic) codes during boot, but even with its help, I could not revive the board; clearly, its BIOS was busted.

Or perhaps not. Today, I looked at that motherboard again: Same symptoms. But then, for no particular reason that I can remember, I decided to remove memory modules from this board and reinsert them in different slots. Much to my astonishment, the board came back to life!

My guess is that either this was an unfortunate coincidence (a bad contact occurring just as I was rebooting after the BIOS flash) or, much more likely, the new BIOS did not like the particular combination of memory slots that I was using (I picked the two slots farthest from the CPU to minimize heating.)

Whatever the reason, the board now works fine. So what am I to do with it? I really don’t need it anymore (this is a board with a single-core CPU and I now have several dual-core boards either in test machines or as spares). Perhaps I should put it up on eBay while it is still worth something?

 Posted by at 11:34 pm
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