Kaku again

 Environment, Physics, Technology  No Responses »
Jun 292011
 

The headline on CNN tonight reads, “An American Fukushima?” The topic: the possibility of wildfires reaching the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos. The guest? Why, it’s Michio Kaku again!

What I first yelled in exasperation, I shall not repeat here, because I don’t want my blog to be blacklisted for obscenity. Besides… I am still using Kaku’s superb Quantum Field Theory, one of the best textbooks on the topic, so I still have some residual respect for him. But the way he is prostituting himself on television, hyping and sensationalizing nuclear accidents… or non-accidents, as the case might be… It is simply disgusting.

Dr. Kaku, in the unlikely case my blog entry catches your attention, here’s some food for thought. The number of people who died in Japan’s once-in-a-millennium megaquake and subsequent tsunami: tens of thousands. The number of people who died as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns: ZERO. Thank you for your attention.

 Posted by at 12:14 am

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

Enigma

 Programming, Science  No Responses »
Jun 072011
 

One of the things I like the least about New Scientist (which, in many respects, is probably the best popular science magazine out there) is the “Enigma” brainteaser. I am sure it appeals to the “oh I am ever so smart!” Mensa member crowd out there but…

Well, the thing is, I never liked brainteasers. Are you really smarter than someone else because you happen to remember a random historical factoid? Does it really make sense to ask you to complete a series like, say, 1, 4, 9, 16, ? when the answer can be anything, as there is no compelling reason other than psychology (!) for it to be a homogeneous quadratic series?

But then… sometimes brainteasers reveal more about the person solving them than about the solution itself. I remember when I was in the second or third grade, our teacher gave us a simple exercise: add all the numbers from 1 to 100. (Yes, this is the same exercise given to a young Gauss.) Like Gauss, one of my classmates discovered (or perhaps knew already) that you can add 1+100 = 101; 2+99 = 101, 3+98 = 101, and so on, all the way up to 50 + 51 = 101; and 50 times 101 is 5050, which is the correct answer.

Trouble is, my classmate didn’t finish first. I did. I just added the darn numbers.

Between quick and smart, who wins? What if you’re so quick, you don’t need to be smart? Is it still smart to waste brainpower to come up with a “clever” solution?

Last week’s New Scientist Enigma puzzle caught my attention because it reminded me of this childhood memory. It took me roughly a minute to solve it. Perhaps there is a cleverer way to do it, but why waste all that brainpower when I can do this instead:

/* New Scientist Enigma number 1647 */

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int d1, d2, d3, d4, d5, d6, n;

    for (d1 = 1; d1 <= 9; d1++)
        for (d2 = 1; d2 <= 9; d2++) if (d2 != d1)
            for (d3 = 1; d3 <= 9; d3++) if (d3 != d1 && d3 != d2)
                for (d4 = 1; d4 <= 9; d4++)
                    if (d4 != d1 && d4 != d2 && d4 != d3)
                        for (d5 = 1; d5 <= 9; d5++)
                            if (d5 != d1 && d5 != d2 && d5 != d3 && d5 != d4)
                                for (d6 = 1; d6 <= 9; d6++)
                                    if (d6 != d1 && d6 != d2 && d6 != d3 &&
                                        d6 != d4 && d6 != d5)
    {
        n = 100000 * d1 + 10000 * d2 + 1000 * d3 + 100 * d4 + 10 * d5 + d6;

        if (n % 19 != 17) continue;
        if (n % 17 != 13) continue;
        if (n % 13 != 11) continue;
        if (n % 11 != 7) continue;
        if (n % d4 != d3) continue;
        printf("ENIGMA = %d\n", n);
    }

    return 0;
}

Yes, I am quick with C. Does that make me smart?

 Posted by at 2:21 pm

New calculators

 Calculators  No Responses »
Jun 052011
 

Years ago, just about every visit to a thrift store yielded a new and interesting addition to my little museum of programmable calculators. Not anymore… the ones still missing are unsurprisingly the ones that are quite hard to find, and in any case, truly vintage calculators are becoming ever more scarce. (I suspect it has to do both with their age and the fact that far too many people discovered eBay.) So it came as a pleasant surprise that the other day (when I made a sad final visit to the veterinary hospital for Tarka’s remains) I found not one, but two vintage calculators in a thrift store along the way. True, they’re not programmables, just ordinary “four-bangers” but they’re certainly vintage alright: a somewhat unusual red LED Lloyd’s brand calculator and a first-generation “yellow LCD” model from Sharp.

 
 Posted by at 7:48 pm

Vigilant cats

 Cats, Personal  No Responses »
Jun 042011
 

I am an atheist. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as heaven, not even kitty heaven. That means that when a cat dies, it is truly dead.

That does not stop me from imagining, though, that in a sense, our two cats Marzipan and Tarka are still with us, perhaps watching our house while we sleep, as these cats do in a wonderful New Yorker cartoon titled Vigil:

 Posted by at 5:18 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

Cell phones

 Health, Technology  No Responses »
Jun 022011
 

After all the hype and insanity, it is reassuring finally to hear a lone voice of sanity in the debate, reignited by the WHO’s idiotic report, about cell phones and cancer.

OK, maybe “idiotic” is too strong a word… how about “irresponsible”? Everything is “possibly carcinogenic” of course. For instance, all cancer cells contain a significant amount of a chemical known as oxygen dihydride. This evil chemical can kill in many different ways, cancer is just one of them… it can also cause asphyxiation.

But back to cell phones. Unlike X-rays or UV, low frequency electromagnetic radiation does not cause chemical changes. The heat generated as a result of brain tissue absorbing a fraction of the phone’s transmitted power (a few hundred mW at most) is minuscule, a tiny fraction of the heat generated by the brain itself as it operates. Furthermore, we are routinely exposed to much stronger low-frequency EM fields generated by things like the electrical wiring in our houses, electric motors, CRT televisions, overhead power lines, other radio transmitters… or, for that matter, heat from a stove, which is also electromagnetic radiation, surprise, surprise (but of course “radiation” sounds a lot scarier than “heat” or “waves”). There is no convincing mechanism, no conclusive evidence either, and plenty of well-established reasons to believe that these cell phone concerns are pure nonsense… so how can a body like the WHO scare people like this? It is reprehensible.

 Posted by at 3:21 am

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

Four

 Cats, Personal  3 Responses »
May 232011
 

And then, there were only four. Cats, that is… our oldest cat, Tarka, our last 20th century cat and the last cat that actually knew our first cat, is no longer with us.

We adopted Tarka over 11 years ago, during the winter of 1999-2000. Shortly thereafter, she settled in a cardboard box that was already a few sizes too small for her. We still have that box.

Good bye.

 Posted by at 11:04 pm

Support for the CBC

 Canada, Radio  No Responses »
May 222011
 

Here’s an interesting argument explaining why the decision to dilute CBC Radio 2 could be strategically devastating for the CBC: the supporters they lost were not only vocal in their opposition to the changes, but also the most fierce defenders of continuing government support and funding for the CBC. No offense to rapper “Buck 65” but I seriously doubt that his listeners would write to their MPs when the CBC’s funding is threatened… certainly not with the same ferocity as listeners of Jurgen Gothe’s unforgettable Disc Drive did while that program was still on the air.

When public institutions hire executives from the private sector, they must keep this in mind. The much coveted younger demographic may not be what public institutions need to go after… as they are not necessarily the ones most likely to vote.

 

 Posted by at 6:33 pm

The sky

 Astronomy  No Responses »
May 162011
 

Here’s one good reason to quit your day job: spend a year or so lugging a set of six astrophotography cameras across two continents, to take some 37,000 exposures of the night sky and stitch them together into an amazing all-sky picture called The Photopic Sky Survey. The scientific value of this picture may be negligible, but it is beautiful to look at, and I am sorely tempted to buy a high-quality print to hang somewhere on my wall. It is one of those pictures that give a true sensation of depth: you can see how nearby stars slowly dissolve into a diffuse, milky background, you can see how dust lanes obscure the Milky Way behind, you can see how the light of distant galaxies filters through. I wonder how a picture like this would have influenced The Great Debate.

 Posted by at 12:49 pm

Contingency planning

 Society  No Responses »
May 152011
 

The concept of a modern general staff includes planning for every foreseeable contingency: thus, when something untoward happens, all general staff officers need to do is to take the appropriate planning folder off a shelf, dust it off, quickly check it to make sure it is not unduly dated, and then put the plan into practice.

What I didn’t know is that in the 21st century, such planning extended all the way to include the contingency of a runaway bride.

 Posted by at 1:37 pm

Tarka

 Cats, Personal  2 Responses »
May 072011
 

Tarka is our oldest cat and she is not doing very well. Her kidneys are failing.

The day before yesterday, her appetite suddenly vanished, and she became lethargic, urinating outside the litter box. I became rather worried, so yesterday I took her to the vet, who determined that in addition to the ailing kidneys, she may also be suffering from hyperthyroidism. They took a blood sample (we’re still waiting for the results), gave her some fluids, and some new medication, and sent her home.

What can you do? In an ailing organism, as one subsystem after another begins to fail, they struggle to keep up and compensate for the failures of one another. It’s like the ever narrowing flight envelope of a high altitude airplane; if you’re a little faster, the airplane breaks apart, if you’re a little slower, it falls out of the sky, and the difference between the two velocities becomes more marginal the higher the airplane flies. (This, combined with a faulty airspeed indicator, may have been one of the causes of the Air France tragedy two years ago.) So how do we keep Tarka flying true for at least a while longer?

I don’t know… yesterday, after I got her back home, she was doing better, eating more than the day before. But today, she hasn’t eaten anything yet and she’s even more lethargic. Is it time to get seriously worried yet? Another visit to the vet may accomplish little beyond exposing her to yet more stress.

 Posted by at 2:23 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
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