Spinor Info

My main computer is dead

Dec 152008

What a bloody joyful day. My main computer is dead this morning. It now even fails to boot. Annoyingly, I don’t have any external SATA enclosures that would allow me to hook one of its drives up to another computer to check for signs of trouble, verify data integrity, and last but not least, make a backup (my last backup is a few days old.) So it’s a trip to the nearest computer store. And once I’m done, my main computer will still be dead, it’s just that I’ll no longer need to worry about what was stored on it (except for the numerous applications, configuration settings, etc…) This is NOT going to be a fun day. Miserable outside, too.

The high-tech era

Space, Technology No Responses »

Dec 142008

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but there is something magically beautiful in vintage 1960s high tech. Take JPL’s Space Flight Operations Center, for instance.

JPL Space Flight Operations Center

Sure, wall-size LCD or plasma screens are nowadays a dime a dozen, and as to the computing equipment in that room, hey, my watch probably has more transistors. Still… there is something awe-inspiring in this picture that is just not there when you walk into a Best Buy.

Mischief

History, Technology No Responses »

Dec 122008

Here is a place where some serious mischief took place nearly half a century ago:

Craters in Nevada

Must be a nice place to visit. Or, if not that, then perhaps this fine Arizona museum next time I drive across the United States.

More OC Transpo strike madness

Society, Transportation No Responses »

Dec 112008

Ottawa U. and Carleton U. are running shuttle services to help students get to exams. OC Transpo’s union leaders are now suggesting that they will attempt to picket these services, too. In other words, they’re now openly declaring the citizens of Ottawa their enemy, as opposed to the bus company. What next, blocking private cars, too? Locking citizens in their homes, lest they compete with the bus service by trying to walk to work?

The more they do this, the less sympathetic I feel towards the strikers, and the more I hope that the city will have the guts to stand firm and wait until the union runs out of money and stamina.

Nice people at Microsoft

Computers No Responses »

Dec 112008

Yes, they are nice. I spent several hours (!) today on the phone with Microsoft, and they really tried to help. In the end, my issue with installing KB958624 remains unresolved but they acknowledged the problem, suggested meaningful ways to deal with it, and promised that it will be researched and that I will be notified.

More importantly, they listened to my comments concerning Activation. This young, very polite engineer from India with impeccable English listened intently and took notes, appreciating my basic concern: Activation (and copy protection in general) will not stop piracy, but it alienates a company’s best friends, namely its paying customers.

Transpo strike

Society No Responses »

Dec 102008

So, OC Transpo is going on strike. Yes, I support the principle of collective bargaining. But I don’t support a bunch of selfish unionists who think they can hold a whole city hostage by taking things to the bring and beyond. The strike doesn’t bother me personally… if anything, I am looking forward to quieter mornings. But the fact that they do this just weeks before Christmas and during a snowstorm speaks volumes. And it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who suffer. If there was justice, a student missing an exam or a single mother of three who is unable to go to work tomorrow morning would spit in the face of every OC Transpo employee who voted for the strike.

No wonder I didn’t like communism, I guess.

Bloody Microsoft updates

Computers 1 Response »

Dec 102008

Microsoft is really pissing me off these days. While necessary, their updates suck.

I’m restarting a VISTA machine about the seventeenth time already, because if I try to install all available updates, all of them fail with an undocumented error, even though I can install them one-by-one.

I’ve installed several updates on an XP laptop, and four of them failed; I tried again, then they succeeded. No apparent reason for the difference.

I’ve installed a bunch of updates on another XP machine, but a few were left out. I installed those, too (Root Certificates and Office 2007 Help updates.) Windows didn’t ask for a restart, but the browser went half-dead afterwards anyhow, so I had to restart.

Meanwhile, I’ve just restarted that VISTA machine again.

You’d think that after all these years, Microsoft would be better at this. But they aren’t. One of these days, they’re going to release a patch that will shut down three hundred million computers around the world and cause more economic damage than the current recession. Then, they’ll call it “behavior by design” and charge us more for support.

Update: I’ve narrowed down the problem to a single update, KB958624. It fails to complete installation after reboot, and upon this failure, the system reverts other updates as well. I have attempted to contact Microsoft about this using their Web based e-mail form; I dutifully completed all the requisite fields, only to be informed after I clicked the last Continue that the requested page is not available. Congratulations, Microsoft, for a professional job well done.

Why MOND?

Physics No Responses »

Dec 082008

The prevailing phenomenological theory of modified gravity is MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics. What baffles me is how MOND managed to acquire this status in the first place.

MOND is based on the ad-hoc postulate that the gravitational acceleration of a body in the presence of a weak gravitational field differs from that predicted by Newton. If we denote the Newtonian acceleration with a, MOND basically says that the real acceleration will be a‘ = μ(a/a₀)a, where μ(x) is a function such that μ(x) = 1 if x >> 1, and μ(x) = x if μ(x) << 1. Perhaps the simplest example is μ(x) = x/(1+x).

OK, so here is the question that I’d like to ask: Exactly how is this different from the kinds of crank explanations I receive occasionally from strangers writing about the Pioneer anomaly? MOND is no more than an ad-hoc empirical formula that works for galaxies (duh, it was designed to do that) but doesn’t work anywhere else, and all the while it violates such basic principles as energy or momentum conservation. How could the physics community ever take something like MOND seriously?

Slacking off under KONTROLL

Film, Transportation No Responses »

Dec 062008

I was slacking off this morning (it’s a Saturday, after all) and I decided to watch a DVD that has been lying around my desk for months. It’s an award-winning Hungarian movie, KONTROLL. No, it has nothing to do with Maxwell Smart’s CONTROL, fighting the evil agents of KAOS. KONTROLL, a movie about the lives of ticket inspectors, train conductors, a serial killer, and other strange characters, is set in its entirety in the Budapest subway system. A subway system that becomes a world by itself, with no daylight, no sunshine, and no contact with the outside world other than through the anonymous masses of subway passengers. I read wonderful things about this movie (it has won a respectable number of international awards) and all I can say is that its reputation is well deserved. Wow! I was in the second grade when the first modern subway line opened in Budapest (the city has a single underground line that is much older, built in 1896, but the first line of the new modern subway system was opened in 1970) and the subway has been part of my daily life until I left Hungary in 1986. Still, I don’t think that after watching this movie I’ll ever be able to look at those subways quite the same way as before.

Destroying the village in order to save it

Politics No Responses »

Dec 052008

It happened yesterday, but it took me a while to digest the news.

Our Prime Minister, gravely concerned about democracy, decided to shut down Parliament.

But wait. Canada is a parliamentary democracy. The government is not elected directly by the people, but chosen by members of the House of Parliament, and answers to that Parliament. These members of Parliament represent the people who elected them. If the majority of them no longer has confidence in the government, the government no longer has legitimacy. To pretend otherwise, to suggest that the shutting down or Parliament was done in order to protect democracy, is no different from that famous Vietnam-era explanation about destroying the village in order to save it.

Also, is it not the same excuse used by many despots around the world who tear down their countries’ democratic institutions in order to maintain their grip on power?

Of course I don’t think that Harper can be compared to, say, a Lukasenko. Nor do I believe that Canada’s democratic system of government is in danger of collapsing. But, doing what he did yesterday, Harper clearly demonstrated his contempt towards the very democracy that he professes to defend by this deeply undemocratic act. I hope the opposition will be able to maintain their resolve and unity and will get rid of Harper as soon as Parliament resumes, on January 26.

I am not necessarily a fan of the US system of government, but this incident underlines why, at least in one respect, it is superior to ours. In the US, the President is not elected by the legislature, but directly (well, technically indirectly, through the electorial system, but that is another issue) by the people. Nor can the legislature remove the President except under very special circumstances, if it is clearly proven that the President abused his office or committed a crime.

Perhaps the next time we consider constitutional reform here in Canada, we should consider the idea of a head of government that is elected directly by the people and does not require the confidence of the legislature to function.

One hundred

Politics No Responses »

Dec 052008

For an intelligent mammalian species with a total of ten appendages on the ends of those limbs that they do not use for perambulation, the number 10 and its various integral powers have special significance. The square of 10, that is, 100, is no exception. Unfortunately, this is also the number of such intelligent mammals who have been, as of today, killed in a place called Afghanistan, while wearing the military uniform of an even larger group of intelligent mammals who collectively call themselves Canada.

The number is alarming, but so is the trend.

Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan, by quarter.

Media circus

Politics 1 Response »

Dec 042008

I went for a walk tonight, and I walked all the way up to Sussex street. As I was getting near Sussex, I began to hear the faint hum of a generator. Sure enough, it belonged to a news media van, as I suspected. There were several of them parked near the entrance of Rideau Hall, waiting like vultures for any announcement that might come from the Governor General concerning the fate of Harper’s government.

I don’t like Harper, but I don’t really dislike him either. He likes cats, and that speaks well of him. However, what he has been doing yesterday and today is despicable. By bashing the separatists, he’s doing no favor to the country he professes to serve, and while it may be a smart tactical decision, it spells strategic disaster for the Conservatives in Quebec.

Why is it that conservatives around the world are resorting to such negative tactics? There was Palin in the US presidential campaign. There is Harper. I am also watching the politics of Hungary, where calling the Prime Minister a traitor or worse is commonplace among the followers of his political opponents. Even when I agree with them otherwise, I find such tactics revolting.

A smile from the heavens

Astronomy 1 Response »

Dec 042008

It appears that the heavens have a sense of humor after all… why else would they be smiling like that?

Smiling Moon

Security or insanity?

Politics, Society No Responses »

Dec 032008

The usual rule is, things are bound to get worse before they get better. The situation with travel security is no exception. Never mind not being able to take a pair of nail scissors or a bottle of water on board an airplane… Greyhound Canada began to implement airport-style security at bus terminals. This is insane, people! Gruesome as that beheading incident was a few months ago, do you really want to live in a society of people who are officially so afraid of one another, they are not willing to travel together unless none of them carries a corkscrew or a knitting needle?

This is just plain stupid. Dumb. Idiotic. I hope the extra expense will drive Greyhound Canada into bankruptcy.

Anomalous positrons: a smoking gun for dark matter?

Physics No Responses »

Dec 022008

In recent weeks, there has been a lot of discussion in the physics community about a curious observation: an abundance of energetic positrons observed by a satellite named PAMELA. According to some people, this unexpected abundance of positrons is likely caused by annihilation of massive dark matter particles, constituting “smoking gun” evidence that dark matter really exists.

Of course it is possible that this abundance is due to some conventional astrophysics, such as pulsars doing this or that. This is a subject of on-going dispute.

One thing I do not see discussed is that the anticipated behavior is apparently based on a model developed several years ago that uses as many as eleven adjustable parameters yet nevertheless, does not produce a spectacularly good fit of even the low energy data. I wonder if I am missing something.

$PAMELA positron fraction and theoretical models.$

PAMELA positron fraction and theoretical models.

OPEC and last year’s Christmas tree

Economy, Media No Responses »

Nov 292008

I am sure this is a fine CBC journalist and her report about OPEC was interesting, but I do wonder: why did she have a dead Christmas tree (looks like leftover from last year) to her left in the background?

OPEC and last year's Christmas tree

Hawking in Waterloo…

Physics No Responses »

Nov 282008

Looks like Stephen Hawking is coming to Waterloo. I may not be an adoring fan, but I am certainly an admirer: being able to overcome such a debilitating disease and live a creative life is no small accomplishment even when you don’t become a world class theoretical physicist in the process.

Coalition government?

Politics No Responses »

Nov 282008

Are we going to have a coalition government in Canada? Perhaps not, now that the Conservatives backed off on their idea to drop federal financing of political parties. I’d have liked to see a coalition government. Sure, multi-party politics are inherently messier than a neat two-party or one-party system, but so long as we don’t end up like Italy or Israel, the result may very well be a more representative, more responsive government.

Anyhow, you just gotta love Chretien’s “Je ne comprends pas anglais” comment…

Upgrade

Computers, Internet No Responses »

Nov 272008

Like other software, this Web logging software, WordPress, also needs to be updated from time to time. It appears that my attempt to update it just now to version 2.6.5 was successful.

This war is brought to you live by…

Media, Politics No Responses »

Nov 272008

Watching the pictures from Mumbai, I cannot help but wonder: when WW3 inevitably arrives, will we also be seeing live pictures and breathless news media coverage as major cities around the world turn into radioactive mushroom clouds and millions of lives are reduced to ash and smoke? Will there be a new Wikipedia article about the nuking of London, Paris, and New York City moments after they occurred, just as there is already an extensive article in Wikipedia on the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks?

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