And he was only 56. I was never much of an Apple fan, but Jobs was undeniably a towering giant of the personal computer era.
Oct 062011
Oct 012011
Once again, our beloved conservative government is trying to turn me into a criminal for simply copying all my (legally purchased) Blu-Ray and DVD movies to a hard drive for convenience. In fact, the proposed law very specifically makes it clear that reproduction for private purposes is legal only if “the individual, in order to make the reproduction, did not circumvent, as defined in section 41, a technological protection measure, as defined in that section, or cause one to be circumvented”.
Looks like I will be a lawbreaker. Or worse, I am a radical extremist, according to our beloved government’s heritage minister.
Meanwhile, the score is Disney: 1, people of Canada: 0, courtesy of the Conservative Party.
Message to Stephen Harper: let me know when you came back to your senses so that I can vote conservative again.
Sep 252011
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately.
Many of my friends asked me about the faster-than-light neutrino announcement from CERN. I must say I am skeptical. One reason why I am skeptical is that no faster-than-light effect was observed in the case of supernova 1987A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud some 170,000 light years from here. Had there been such an effect of the magnitude supposedly observed at CERN, neutrinos from this supernova would have arrived years before visible light, but that was not the case. Yes, there are ways to explain away this (the neutrinos in question have rather different energy levels) but these explanations are not necessarily very convincing.
Another reason, however, is that faster-than-light neutrinos would be eminently usable in a technological sense; if it is possible to emit and observe them, it is almost trivial to build a machine that sends a signal in a closed timelike loop, effectively allowing us to send information from the future to the present. In other words, future me should be able to send present me a signal, preferably with the blueprints for the time machine of course (why do all that hard work if I can get the blueprints from future me for free?) So, I said, if faster-than-light neutrinos exist, then future me should contact present me in three…, two…, one…, now! Hmmm… no contact. No faster-than-light neutrinos, then.
But that’s when I suddenly remembered an uncanny occurrence that happened to me just hours earlier, yesterday morning. We ran out of bread, and we were also out of the little mandarin or clementine oranges that I like to have with my breakfast. So I took a walk, visiting our favorite Portuguese bakery on Nelson street, with a detour to the nearby Loblaws supermarket. On my way, I walked across a small parking lot, where I suddenly spotted something: a mandarin orange on the ground. I picked it up… it seemed fresh and completely undamaged. Precisely what I was going out for. Was it just a coincidence? Or perhaps future me was trying to send a subtle signal to present me about the feasibility of time machines?
If it’s the latter, maybe future me watched too much Doctor Who, too. Next time, just send those blueprints.
Sep 222011
I’m back from a week-long trip to Hungary. We had our 30-year high school reunion last Saturday; it was very enjoyable. All in all, everything went well, so well in fact that it leaves me worried; am I missing something?
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!
Sep 122011
The other day, I bought some new undershirts. It was my wife who noticed something on the label that escaped my attention: Made in Canada/Fabrique au Canada. It has been so long since I last saw such a label, I almost forgot what it looks like. The undershirts were made by Stanfields, in Nova Scotia.
I also got two books from my wife. They were both printed in the USA. What can I say… neat.
Sep 062011
It has been a while since I did anything in machine language. Until this past weekend, that is, when I spent a fair bit of time starting at disassembled code with a debugger.
Last week, I upgraded my Sony Ericsson smartphone to the latest version of its operating system. The upgrade process failed on my main computer when, after updated USB drivers for the phone were downloaded, they failed to install. The problem was not specific to the phone: all driver installations failed, with a not very informative code (0xC0000142, which just means that the application failed to initialize.)
Using the very helpful ProcMon utility from sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft) I managed to identify that it was a process named drvinst.exe that failed. This process is invoked automatically by the system every time a USB device is inserted, and also during device driver installations. So why did it fail?
I downloaded the latest Windows debugger (windbg.exe) from Microsoft; this debugger allows me to do things like debug child processes spawned by a parent process. (I later learned that drvinst.exe actually has a feature whereas it waits for a debugger after startup, to help with driver installation debugging; but chances are that I would not have been able to make much use of this feature, as the failure occurred before drvinst.exe actually started to execute its own code.) I attached the debugger to the DCOM service process (which is the one that spawns copies of drvinst.exe.) I was able to determine that it was during the initial process setup stage that this process failed, when it was attempting to attach to the gdi32.dll system library.
I still have no idea why this happens. But with the help of the debugger, I was able to tinker with this process, changing a processor register’s value at just the right spot, allowing it to continue. This inconvenient but workable process allowed me to install drivers for my phone and also updated drivers for my wireless mouse from Microsoft Update.
Perhaps the most incomprehensible bit is that the same thing works fine on an essentially identical computer. The actual failure occurs inside a kernel subroutine (undocumented system call 123Ah, called from GdiDllInitialize in gdi32.dll) that I cannot debug without a kernel debugger (and since I am trying not to mess my machine up too much, I opted not to do kernel debugging). That subroutine does not appear to be doing anything particularly magical. I checked and all relevant files and Registry settings are identical on the two machines. So it remains a mystery for now… nonetheless, it was educational. I learned a lot about driver installation in Windows 7, about process startup, and incidentally, about the ReactOS project whose open source equivalents to the relevant system components helped me a great deal to understand what was going on.
Sep 032011
I am reading an article in Science about the efforts of people like planetary scientist David Morrison to allay fears concerning a prophesied collision between the Earth and the mythical planet Nibiru. Apparently, some folks are taking this pseudoscientific hogwash so seriously, they are even contemplating suicide. Good people like Morrison are trying to talk sense into them.
Perhaps they shouldn’t. Here is my message: go ahead, kill yourself. That means that for the rest of us, 2013 will be a happier year, because fewer idiots will roam the Earth.
But just to demonstrate that I am not all arrogant and cruel, here’s another option: you can always choose to come to your senses before December 21, 2012, realize that stuff in Hollywood movies should not be confused with real life, and go on living.
Aug 272011
I never thought Apple computers were hip. Every so often, I thought about buying Apple hardware, but if I did so, I’d want a development system, so my shopping cart at apple.ca rapidly ballooned to some 2,000 dollars… by which time I inevitably realized that I’d be buying expensive toys that would become obsolete long before I’d find the time needed to become proficient with Apple’s development tools.
And now here is an interesting article, from the Ottawa Citizen no less, elaborating on something that I felt all along: that despite its hip image, what Apple sold to the masses all along was really mediocrity.
Of course this probably means that I am not one of the cool kids, but if that is the case, so be it… life is way too short to worry about coolness.
Aug 192011
Our paper on the temporal behavior of the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11 is now published online by Physical Review Letters, and it is an Editor’s Suggestion, featured in Physical Review Focus.
Aug 172011
I am not usually in the business of recommending software or hardware products, and it’s certainly not something anyone pays me to do… but recently, I began using two products, both of which have exceptional value, even though one came free of charge and the other cost only 150 dollars.
The free product is Secunia’s Personal Software Inspector (PSI), a software application that turned from something I never heard about into something I cannot live without virtually overnight. It is an application that keeps tabs on all the software installed on your computer and lets you know if any of them are out of date and require updates. Like antivirus software, PSI sits quietly in the background most of the time, but it pops up an unobtrusive warning whenever a new update becomes available, and even offers a direct link to the manufacturer’s download site. It is nice, incredibly useful, it recognizes hundreds of installed applications, and, well, it works as it is supposed to and doesn’t cost a penny.
The product I paid money for is a Cisco RV042 small business router. It does what small business routers do, connects your internal network to an external (DSL, cable, etc.) Internet connection. What makes it special is that it allows your internal network to be connected to two external connections at the same time, and it performs dynamic load balancing and failover functions between the two. I now set up my network architecture to take full advantage of it… and in the coming days, it will be working overtime, as I am planning a major change to my DSL service which will likely involve some unpredictable downtime. The router has other useful functions, too, not the least of which is that it can act as a VPN server, allowing a remote computer to connect to the internal network. The best part is that, like Secunia’s software, it simply works as advertised.
Aug 122011
Back when I was learning the elementary basics of FORTRAN programming in Hungary in the 1970s, I frequently heard an urban legend according to which the sorry state of computer science in the East Bloc was a result of Stalin’s suspicious attitude towards cybernetics, which he considered a kind of intellectual swindlery from the decadent West. It seemed to make sense, neglecting of course the fact that the technological gap between East and West was widening, and that back in the 1950s, Soviet computers compared favorably to Western machines; and that it was only in the 1960s that a slow, painful decline began, as the Soviets began to rely increasingly on stolen Western technology.
Nonetheless, it appears that Stalin was right after all, insofar as cybernetics is concerned. I always thought that cybernetics was more or less synonymous with computer science, although I really have not given it much thought lately, as the term largely fell into disuse anyway. But now, I am reading an intriguing book titled “The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future” by Andrew Pickering, and I am amazed. For instance, until now I never heard of Project Cybersyn, a project conceived by British cyberneticists to create the ultimate centrally planned economy for socialist Chile in the early 1970s, complete with a futuristic control room. No wonder Allende’s regime failed miserably! The only thing I cannot decide is which was greater: the arrogance or dishonesty of those intellectuals who created this project. A project that, incidentally, also carried a considerable potential for misuse, as evidenced by the fact that its creators received invitations from other repressive regimes to implement similar systems.
Stalin may have been one of the most prolific mass murderers in history, but he wasn’t stupid. His suspicions concerning cybernetics may have been right on the money.
Aug 122011
I am reading a very interesting paper by Mishra and Singh. In it, they claim that simply accounting for the gravitational quadrupole moment in a matter-filled universe would naturally produce the same gravitational equations of motion that we have been investigating with John Moffat these past few years. If true, this work would imply that that our Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity (STVG) is in fact an effective theory (which is not necessarily surprising). Its vector and scalar degrees of freedom may arise as a result of an averaging process. The fact that they not only recover the STVG acceleration law but the correct numerical value of at least one of the STVG constants, too, suggests that this may be more than a mere coincidence. Needless to say, I am intrigued.
Aug 052011
As I’ve been asked about this more than once before, I thought I’d write down an answer to a simple question concerning the Pioneer spacecraft: if the “thermal hypothesis”, namely that the spacecraft are decelerating due to the heat they radiate, is true, how come this deceleration diminishes more rapidly, with a half-life of 20-odd years, than the primary heat source on board, which is plutonium-238 fuel with a half-life of 87.74 years?
The answer is simple: there are other half-lives on board. Notably, the half-life of the efficiency of the thermocouples that convert the heat of plutonium into electricity.
Now most of that heat from plutonium is simply wasted; it is radiated away, and while it may produce a recoil force, it does so with very low efficiency, say, 1%. The thermocouples convert about 6% of heat into electricity, but as the plutonium fuel cools and the thermocouples age, their efficiency decreases (this is in fact measurable, as telemetry tells us exactly how much electricity was generated on board at any given moment.) All that electrical energy has to go somewhere… and indeed it does, powering all on-board instrumentation that, like a home computer, ultimately turn all the energy they consume into heat. This heat is radiated away, and it is in fact converted into a recoil force with an efficiency of about 40%.
These are all the numbers we need. The recoil force, then, will be proportional to 1% of 100% − 6% = 94% plus 40% of 6% of the total thermal power (say, 2500 W at the beginning). The total power will decrease at a rate of \(2^{-T/87.74}\), so after \(T\) number of years, it will be \(2500\times 2^{-T/87.74}\) W. As to the thermocouple efficiency, its half-life may be around 30 years; so the electrical conversion efficiency goes from 6% to \(6\times 2^{-T/30.0}\) % after \(T\) years.
So the overall recoil force can be calculated as being proportional to
$$P(T)=2500\times 2^{-T/87.74}\times\left\{\left[1-0.06\times 2^{-T/30.0}\right]\times 0.01+0.06\times 2^{-T/30.0}\times 0.4\right\}.$$
(This actually gives a result in watts. To convert it into an actual force, we need to divide by the speed of light, 300,000,000 m/s.) With a bit of simple algebra, this formula can be simplified to
$$P(T)=25.0\times 2^{-T/87.74}+58.5\times 2^{-T/22.36}.$$
The most curious thing about this result is that the recoil force is dominated by a term that has a half-life of only 22.36 years… which is less than the half-life of either the plutonium fuel or the thermocouple efficiency.
The numbers I used are not the actual numbers from telemetry (though they are not too far from reality) but this calculation still demonstrates the fallacy of the argument that just because the power source has a specific half-life, the thermal recoil force must have the same half-life.
Aug 022011
I am catching up with my reading of recent issues of New Scientist, which arrived all at once after our recent postal strike.
Cephalopods are smart. So smart in fact that they are tool users, the only invertebrates we know about that have this ability. Yet they evolved entirely differently from us, having split from us some half a billion years ago on the evolutionary tree. Some argue that cephalopods deserve extra protection; on the other hand, we don’t even know how to anesthetize them properly.
I also wonder if the SETI folks are taking notice. We think we are so smart that we can talk to aliens? How about learning first how to communicate with a giant squid. Compared to aliens, these guys are our cousins after all.
Aug 022011
Finally, a voice of reason.
I just read an opinion piece in New Scientist by Erle Ellis. His message is simple: Welcome to the Anthropocene. Ellis believes that the geological epoch called the Holocene is over; the landscape of the Earth has been altered irreversibly by humans, but not all such change is bad or unwelcome. In any case, there is no turning back. The question is not how to undo what we have done, but how to create a better, more sustainable Anthropocene, as we have become the creators, engineers, and stewards of this world.
This has also been my opinion for a long time. Humans are no less “natural” than apes, ants, whales, or trees. By extension, a skyscraper or a factory are no less natural than an anthill or a bird’s nest. However, it has happened in the past that a species overwhelmed and destroyed the environment in which it once thrived. Humans can suffer the same fate… except that we do possess oversize brains and the ability to plan ahead in the long term. What we need is not some romantic notion of a “pristine planet”, but to learn how to manage a planet of finite resources that is dominated, and irreversibly altered, by our presence.
Aug 012011
First the first time in seven years (!), my main Internet connection is down, and will likely stay down until at least Tuesday. This being a long weekend, no telco technician is available until then, and they determined that the fault is likely a partial short in the physical circuit. Bloody hell.
Now I am scrambling to reroute everything to a backup server, provided courtesy of a good friend of mine. I asked him to only move around on tiptoes until Tuesday, and I am begging Murphy not to strike again until then…
Jul 302011
Every summer, on every Canadian TV channel, during just about every commercial break, a commercial for Marineland in Niagara Falls is shown… with a song that just drives me bonkers. I’d sooner listen to a hundred pieces of chalk scratching a hundred chalkboards. Will they ever stop?
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?
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.