Spinor Info

Weird

Jul 132009

I have this hard drive. Two hard drives, actually, two out of many, these two being distinguished by the fact that at one time or another, they’ve been used in my old Fujitsu laptop.

The original drive was a 40 GB drive, which I replaced with an 80 GB drive years ago. I’ve since used the 40 GB drive in an external enclosure as a backup drive. I have several other drives of varying sizes in similar/identical enclosures.

Then there is the 80 GB drive, which has been the drive in this laptop for the last couple of years. But now that I no longer use this laptop myself, I figured I’d set it up for my wife. And since she doesn’t need an 80 GB drive, and the 40 GB drive was proving to be rather small for my backup needs, I decided to swap the drives back.

But then, the 80 GB drive that I took out of the laptop refused to function properly in the external enclosure. It was recognized alright, but no data could be read off it, not even the partition table. Same behavior on several computers running different operating systems (various Windows versions and Linux.)

Oops, I said, and swapped the drives back. Lo and behold, the 80 GB drive was again working fine, inside the laptop. But when I put the 40 GB drive back into the enclosure, I was in for a surprise: it was no longer working!

What the… I swapped the drives back and forth, they were both working fine in the laptop, but not working in the enclosure. Perhaps the enclosure is faulty? A logical thought, except that when I swapped enclosures using one of my several other backup drives, the enclosure was working just fine… but neither the 40 GB nor the 80 GB drive works in any of the three enclosures that I tested them with so far. Yet they both work fine in the laptop.

I must say I am stumped. I’ve never encountered a problem like this. Why would a drive work fine in a laptop but not in an external enclosure? Why would another drive, which used to work fine in the enclosure, fail after it has been inside a laptop (with, I should hasten to add, no operating system booted, so it’s not like there was a chance for a virus to affect the drive or anything like.) Modern drives do have persistent memory, but surely there are no persistent settings that would affect a drive like this? In any case, the 40 GB drive used to live in this laptop for years, and worked fine afterwards in the enclosure for years. But now, after it has been in the laptop again, it fails in the enclosure. Why?

Weird.

And I am supposed to be an expert at this.

Unintentional humor

Television No Responses »

Jul 122009

Discovery Canada advertises its lineup of programs for next week. On several occasions now they announced the following:

“Destroyed in Seconds… right after How It’s Made.”

I could be wrong but I don’t think that the humor was intentional.

Cleeseblog

Pop culture No Responses »

Jul 112009

Hah! I just happened upon the blog site of my favorite British writer, actor, and tall person: John Cleese.

I especially enjoyed the video interview with him made shortly before last year’s American presidential elections.

Peter principle

Society No Responses »

Jul 092009

Ever since I first read about the Peter principle, named after the late Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter, it always made sense to me: promoting people based on their competence likely lands them in jobs that exceed their competence level, lowering the overall effectiveness of the organization.

Now we have proof: a new paper on ArXiv (which works fine today, thankfully) shows the results of a computer simulation demonstrating a rapid decrease in efficiency as a result of a competence-based promotion system.

Harper’s communion wafer

Politics, Religion No Responses »

Jul 092009

The big news on Canadian news channels today comes in the form of a question: did Prime Minister Harper eat his communion wafer?

Harper, who’s not a Catholic, accepted a communion wafer anyway during the funeral service of the late Roméo Leblanc. Unfortunately, the camera cut away before he was seen actually eating it. So people are upset: not treating the body of Christ with the proper respect is a grave insult to Catholics, it appears.

As to why actually eating something that symbolizes the body of Christ is not a grave insult, well, I suppose people have pondered this question ever since Roman times. And here, I thought we live in the bleeping twenty-first century…

Massive ArXiv failure?

Astronomy, Internet, Physics No Responses »

Jul 082009

The premier Internet physics and astronomy preprint archive, ArXiv, seems to be having some serious problems tonight. I used the catchup interface to check for new papers, only to find messages like this:

Problem displaying entry for arXiv:0907.1079

Apparently all new papers are unavailable, and many older papers, too… I checked briefly and found papers dating back to last October that appear to have vanished. Including some half a dozen or so papers of my own.

I sure hope they keep backups!

Tinkering with Radio 2

Canada, Radio No Responses »

Jul 042009

The CBC is tinkering with Radio 2 again. After the devastation last year, they may have made some tentative steps in the right direction for a change. VERY small steps, to be sure.

But there are also some bad news: Jurgen Gothe is no longer on Radio 2 anymore. I admit I didn’t listen much to his Sunday program Farrago this past year, as the time slot was just too inconvenient. But, I still shake my head in disbelief at the CBC’s decision last year to cancel Disc Drive, arguably one of the best damn radio shows ever made.

So I’ve been reading some comments on the CBC Web site. There is near universal condemnation of Radio 2’s management: nearly all who posted comments believe that Radio 2 lost its direction, that taxpayer money is wasted on a radio station that is sounding ever more like commercial radio, that the station got rid of its knowledgeable hosts, and that its choice of music is just awful.

I think one big misunderstanding is the notion the listeners of the old Radio 2 only wanted classical music. That’s nonsense. Jurgen’s program was great not because it was classical, but because it had the right mix of classical, jazz, folk, and yes, even pop music. This eclecticism is now lost, and they cannot bring it back easily because the hosts who made it possible are gone, too.

Here are two comments, in particular, that I rather agree with, typos notwithstanding:

“Separating the genres works for people who only like clasical [sic!] or only like pop or only like jazz but a very large part of the population quite like an eclectic mix. It is possible to like both Beethoven and Michael Jackson, De Bussy [sic!] and Salsa.”

“Now that Jurgen has totally left the CBC, when will some bright adventure capitalist start up a private subscription radio or Internet station with Jurgen Goth, Danielle Charboneau, Rick Phillips et al. My subscription is ready.”

What can I say. My subscription is ready, too. Where do I sign up?

End of an era

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Jul 022009

Long before there was a commercial Internet, there were dial-up service providers, bulletin board systems, and the like. At one time, the largest among these was CompuServe, offering a comprehensive range of services including hundreds (if not thousands) of forums, online chat, downloads, and games. Indeed there was a time when no self-respecting computer company existed without a support forum on CompuServe.

I became a CompuServe subscriber in 1991 I believe. Soon after, I discovered a wonderful game hosted by CompuServe: Richard Bartle’s original Multi-User Dungeon, running under the name British Legends. Ten years ago, CompuServe discontinued British Legends using the bogus excuse that the game is not Y2K compatible; I have been running a faithfully ported version of this game on my server ever since.

But the CompuServe service remained. Under the brand name CompuServe Classic, the original service stayed in operation in all these years. Its value was greatly diminished, but it was still usable as a reliable international dial-up Internet service provider (indeed, this is the reason why I kept my CompuServe subscription active.) That is, until now.

A few months ago, they sent out an e-mail informing users that the Classic service will be discontinued on June 30.

Out of curiosity, I tried logging on to CompuServe moments ago. Yes, the old text-based services were still available until recently. But today, this is what I am greeted with:

$ telnet gateway.compuserve.com
Trying 209.154.35.102...
Connected to gateway.compuserve.com.
Escape character is '^]'.

User ID: 70674,3414

?? LOGSTU - System BHC is temporarily unavailable

Well, what can I say? So long, and thanks for all the fun.

MOJ459P

Computers, Internet, Television No Responses »

Jul 022009

There is something positively charming about the random nature of the Internet.

I am watching a British comedy, One Foot in the Grave, on Vision TV (as to why a supposedly religious channel is broadcasting somewhat risqué British comedies in the first place, now that’s a question for another day, but I am certainly glad that they do.) At one point, the story features an old Citroen that appears in a trash dumpster in front of the protagonist’s house. The car has a license plate: MOJ459P.

On a whim, I entered this license plate number into Google. Surprisingly, there was a hit: http://www.convergence.cx/. For no discernible reason, the page features nothing else but the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and an immortal quote from Charles Babbage, pondering the sanity of members of Parliament who were wondering if his machine could give correct answers if given wrong data.

And it is a weird Web site. The page contains an invisible link to a host-side script that barfs back a series of random generated e-mail addresses. Or, I should say, almost random generated; among a bunch of bogus addresses, the e-mail addresses associated with the registration information of the IP number from which I perform the query also appear. What this means, I have no idea. The site doesn’t seem malicious, but then what is it? The top-level domain .cx is the country code for Christmas Island, but the site itself is registered as a “Convergence Organisation Object”, in London, the United Kingdom, since 2001. I have no idea what it is. Curious.

Electric steam?

Technology, Transportation No Responses »

Jun 292009

I was watching the noon local newscast and learned that the Wakefield steam train, a popular tourist attraction nearby, is back in service, after it has been shut down in the middle of its track Saturday due to an electrical fault in its engine that could not be repaired right away.

Wait a minute. Steam train? Electric fault?

Obsolete cosmology

Physics No Responses »

Jun 272009

I recently read a review of Weinberg’s wonderful new book, Cosmology, a 2009 sequel of sorts to his 1972 classic, Gravitation and Cosmology. The reviewer mentioned two other books, that of Mukhanov and that of Dodelson, as books worth having. Mukhanov’s Physical Foundations of Cosmology was already on my bookshelf (and, like the reviewer, I also consider it worth having) but not Dodelson’s book… so I decided to buy it.

I was not disappointed: it is an excellent cosmology book. In particular, it offers a very thorough introduction to the quantitative aspects of physical cosmology.

However… although the book was published only six years ago, it feels surprisingly dated. Through no fault of the author, to be clear: it’s just that cosmology has made tremendous progress in a few short years. I can think of two things in particular: results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), first released in 2005, providing precision maps of the cosmic microwave background, allowing accurate detection of the so-called acoustic peaks; and ever improving large scale galaxy surveys, notably the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), providing spectra for many hundreds of thousands of galaxies, yielding 3D density maps of the deep cosmos that can be used to test models of structure formation.

The results speak for themselves. For instance, Dodelson’s book gives 12.6 ± 1.1 billion years as the age of the Universe… in contrast, the latest WMAP result is 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years, a tenfold improvement in the accuracy of the estimate. I guess it’s not an enviable task to write a book for a field that is changing as rapidly as Modern Cosmology… which also happens to be the title of Dodelson’s book.

Skype 4? No thanks…

Computers, Programming No Responses »

Jun 252009

A few days ago, I upgraded to Skype 4.

I use Skype for overseas telephone calls a lot. I also call a few people occasionally using Skype-to-Skype. And, every once in a while, I use it to chat with people.

I have heard bad things about Skype 4 so I was not in a hurry to upgrade. But when, the other day, the software notified me that a major upgrade is available, I decided to give it a try.

Wish I didn’t.

The installation completed successfully, and Skype worked fine, but… well, it’s best if I just quote a few sentences from Skype’s own Web site where the new version was announced:

Skype 4.0 should certainly participate in the worst software redesign conquest.
Worst interface ever created for Skype and i’ve been using it ever since the 1st beta. Please dump this garbage
Skype 4.0 has an extreme ugly layout.
The UI of version 4 is a terrible disappointment. No matter how I tweak, it still consumes more screen real-estate than version 3 did.
Who are you people and what were you thinking when you released this kludge.
ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE INTERFACE
Skype 4.0.x is PAINFUL and FRUSTRATING TO USE.
I think this is the ‘vista’ of skype releases.
What where you thinking. Did you guys outsource? This version has all the hallmarks of a design by committee.
I truly do not like the new 4.0 version! I’ve tried it for a week, hoping to get used to it, and i’m just left cursing. I am reverting because…

I share these sentiments. This morning, I gave up and downgraded to the 3.8 version. Which is working fine, as always.

Propagandists and statisticians

Mathematics, Politics No Responses »

Jun 242009

I found this gem of a sentence on the Web site of the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran here in Ottawa:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will register acts of all these states whose records are filled with support for terrorism, pro-colonialist policies for colonizing the oppressed nations, support for the despotic regimes, arming some with weapons of mass destruction and support for anarchy in all parts of the world as disdainful behavior and stipulates that they can not cast doubt on the excellent democratic election held recently in the Islamic Republic of Iran by no means advising them to change their miscalculated approach vis-à-vis the developments having taken place in Iran because designers of the chess game are closely monitoring their behavior and calculating them in the future relations.”

This sentence reminds me of Soviet-era propaganda leaflets. I wonder if the Islamic Republic of Iran has hired propagandists from the former Soviet Union who were left unemployed after 1991.

Anyhow, what exactly are they saying here? Something is wrong with this sentence. They say that,

The Islamic Republic of Iran

will register, as disdainful behavior,

acts of all these states whose records are filled with

support for terrorism,

pro-colonialist policies for colonizing the oppressed nations,

support for the despotic regimes, arming some with weapons of mass destruction and

support for anarchy in all parts of the world

and

stipulates that they can not cast doubt on the excellent democratic election held recently in the Islamic Republic of Iran

by no means advising them to change their miscalculated approach vis-à-vis the developments having taken place in Iran

because

designers of the chess game are closely monitoring their behavior and calculating them in the future relations.

Hmmm… they seem to be telling us that despite all the bad things they say about our disdainful behavior, they are NOT advising us to change our miscalculated approach. The reason for this surprising advice has to do with the designers of the game of chess. Okay, I know that chess may have arrived in Europe from India by way of Persia, but what do the long dead inventors of one of the world’s most popular games have to do with the reelection of Ahmedinejad?

Maybe they are trying to confuse us intentionally, in order to deflect our attention away from a study that suggests that the election was seriously rigged. They really shouldn’t bother. This study says that the election was likely rigged because the final two digits of provincial results show unlikely statistics. But unlikely is not the same as impossible, and unless they can quantify how much more likely this outcome is in a rigged election, the study means nothing; after all, 1-2-3-4-5-6 is as likely to win in a random 6/49 lottery draw as any other number combination, and if they pick these numbers next week, it does not prove fraud by the lottery corporation. For that claim, one would also have to quantify the increased likelihood that a fraudulent draw is more likely to produce the 1-2-3-4-5-6 result when compared to a truly random draw.

Updating Skype

Computers No Responses »

Jun 232009

I’ve been using Skype since last year. Initially, I resisted, but then there were to strong reasons to use it: one, regular phone line quality has been steadily going down the drain as long distance companies increasingly began to use VoIP, and two, I was doing a bit of traveling, and Skype is a heck of a lot cheaper than hotel phones.

I’ve had Skype version 3 installed, and by and large, I was happy. I’ve been using Skype a lot to call Europe, for instance, and it worked most of the time at least as reliably as the good old phone company.

However, lately I had some call quality problems and Skype’s advice was to upgrade. So, when the other day, the software informed me that a new version is available to install, I accepted it. The new version installed just fine, and it is working fine… I can’t really tell if it actually delivers improved sound quality, but I have no reason to doubt Skype.

What the new version doesn’t deliver is an improved user interface. Simply put, the version 4 UI is not pretty. “Compact Mode” is not really compact anymore, you just get multiple windows. In regular mode, the Skype window is just huge. And, it’s ugly. For manual dial, it has an unpleasant looking, overly large dial pad. For other modes, the interface is equally unappealing, with large unused areas.

What were these people thinking? Seriously, it feels like I went back 5-10 years in time in terms of UI quality. If Skype 3 was like Windows XP, Skype 4 is more like Windows 95. I’m seriously contemplating uninstalling Skype and reinstalling version 3. I’m just not sure if it’s worth the hassle.

Is Ignatieff a wimp, too?

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Jun 202009

Earlier this year, Michael Ignatieff replaced Stephane Dion as the head of the Liberal Party. This was supposed to change things: no more wimpy compromises, finally a charismatic (some even said scary) leader at the head of the official opposition who’ll surely fire Harper’s bumbling government soon.

Well, he didn’t. Ignatieff looks a great deal less scary today. And I can’t say that I agree with him. An all time record of a deficit, the incompetence of the minister handling the Chalk River affair, and a proposed crime bill that would seriously compromise our Internet privacy are just some of the issues that I have with Harper’s government and why I’d like to see him go.

The silver lining to this cloud is that we continue to enjoy the benefits of a minority government, which is far less likely to do harm than a government commanding a majority.

Why is the RCMP lying?

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Jun 202009

I was never much of a believer in negative cop stereotypes nor do I believe that the “powers that be” are conspiring to get you. But today’s revelation that the RCMP agents who tasered Robert Dziekanski to death last year were in fact flat our lying to the official inquiry is enough to make even the staunchest opponent of conspiracy theories blink. The word “outrageous” doesn’t even come close to describing it.

Republicans and Iran

Politics No Responses »

Jun 192009

Republicans in the US are criticizing Obama for his hands-off approach concerning the events in Iran.

So here is my question: what, exactly, do Republicans want?

Do they want to help Iran? Because in that case, the best thing to do is to shut up. Twenty years ago another Republican, the elder President Bush, explained in an interview why he did not go to gloat and “dance on the top of the Berlin Wall”: because if anything, it would have just encouraged the ruling elites of the East Bloc to crack down instead of facilitating a largely peaceful transition to democracy. The same is true today: loud protests by Obama about election fraud and crackdowns in Iran would only help the ruling elite.

Do Republicans not realize this? I doubt that they are that dumb. But then, I have to conclude that they are just turning this, along with everything else, into a partisan issue. They couldn’t care less as to what happens in Teheran, so long as they can bash Obama.

Hmmm, there’s an even worse alternative. Perhaps they actually want the ruling elite in Teheran to stay in power. How else could they continue to demonize Iran, and Islam in general?

The irony of Iran’s election results

Politics No Responses »

Jun 162009

I am reading a very interesting document: the results of an “uncensored survey”, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion in the days leading up to Iran’s elections.

If I interpret their chart on page 8 of the PDF report correctly, 78% of the respondents they interviewed indicated an intent to vote. The number of eligible voters being 100%, 34% expressed support for Ahmedinejad, 14% for Moussavi, 3% for the other two candidates, while 27% were still undecided. If I divide up the undecided equally between Ahmedinejad and Moussavi, I get 61% vs. 35% of the total number of votes cast, with 78% participation.

The actual, official result was 85% participation, with 62.63% voting for Ahmedinejad and 33.75% for Moussavi; the difference is statistically insignificant.

It would be the ultimate irony if Iran’s theocratic regime was brought down by accusations of widespread electoral fraud yet no actual fraud had taken place.

Letterman and Palin

Politics No Responses »

Jun 162009

David Letterman finally apologized for the joke he made last week about Sarah Palin and her daughter, a joke that was clearly in bad taste.

When I first heard about Sarah Palin, just after it was announced that she would be the running mate of John McCain in 2008, I remember the disbelief that I felt. Whatever temporary insanity possessed the inhabitants of Alaska when they elected her (or is it just that we live in an era of political populism, be it the case of the once small town mayor now popular governor of Alaska or, say, the once Teheran mayor now popular president of Iran?) my immediate reaction when I saw governor Palin and her family on television was to wonder if I might have accidentally set on my remote and switched to The Jerry Springer Show without noticing. Everything about governor Palin: her mannerisms (including how she manages to include wannabe beauty queen phrases like “the great state of Alaska” into every second sentence she utters), her family life, the names she gave to her children… about the only thing missing from the picture was a fight on stage, to be broken up by security.

Now I don’t wish to fall into the same trap as Letterman… family members, especially underage family members of a politician are not fair game, not even for late night comics. Yet, if the Palin family accurately reflects “conservative family values”, then perhaps it is appropriate to question the validity of those values, and possible to do so without insulting unwitting members of the Palin family. On the other hand, if the Palin family does not accurately reflect conservative family values, then perhaps it is right to accuse conservatives of hypocrisy, again without ad hominem insults.

Iran’s “elections”

Politics No Responses »

Jun 142009

Chances are that if you are reading this, especially if you are reading this through Facebook, you are not located in Iran.

Presidential elections in Iran are over, and the people have spoken: Dr. Ahmedinejad has been reelected with a landslide.

At least that’s what the Iranian government would like you to believe. Desperately. Which explain’s Ahmedinejad’s farce of a press conference, or the fact that lines of communication to/from and within Iran are increasingly being shut down by the Iranian authorities. And now there is a massive demonstration being held in favor of the newly reelected president, while his main opponent, Moussavi, is nowhere to be seen, presumed by some to be under house arrest.

So here is what I am wondering about: is Ahmedinejad about to turn into a Ceaucescu on us? Ceaucescu did the same thing, held a massive rally in the town of Timisoara to demonstrate that he has the support of the people. Well… he didn’t.

Does Ahmedinejad have the needed support to maintain his position in the Islamic Republic, a state with a split personality that pretends to be democratic, yet rejects what they call “liberal democracy”?

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