Courtesy of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, I just stumbled upon gapminder.org: an amazing data visualization project, complete with a downloadable desktop version, providing animated plots of many important economic, health, and social indicators. Statistics is usually a dry topic, but the bouncing bubbles of gapminder.org are actually fun to watch!
Hungary’s government thinks destroying secret police archives from the Communist era is a good idea. I have to wonder… is the intent to protect those whose personal lives were monitored and recorded in minute detail by the almighty State? Or, more likely I think, are they planning this because they have something to hide? For what it’s worth, I signed an online petition protesting this destruction of historical documents.
I swear that when I first saw this news headline frame on BBC World News, I thought I was looking at a herd of sheep in a field:
In reality, I think, these are some of the antennas of the Very Large Array.
I have written several papers concerning the possible contribution of heat emitted by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft. Doubtless I’ll write some more.
But those RTGs used for space missions number only a handful, and with the exception of those that fell back to the Earth (and were safely recovered) they are all a safe distance away (a very long way away indeed) from the Earth.
However, RTGs were also used here on the ground. In fact, according to a report I just finished reading, a ridiculously high number of them, some 1500, were deployed by the former Soviet Union to power remote lighthouses, navigation beacons, meteorological stations, and who knows what else. These installations are unguarded, and the RTGs themselves are not tamper-proof. Many have ended up in the hands of scrap metal scavengers (some of whom actually died after receiving a lethal dose of radiation), some sank to the bottom of the sea, some remain exposed to the elements with their radioactive core compromised. Worse yet, unlike their counterparts in the US space program which used plutonium, these RTGs use strontium-90 as their power source; strontium is absorbed by the body more readily than plutonium, so my guess is, exposure to strontium is even more hazardous than exposure to plutonium.
The report is a few years old, so perhaps things improved since a little. Or, perhaps they have gotten worse… who knows how many radioactive power sources have since found their way into unauthorized hands.
Years ago, back in 2002 to be precise, I had an idea. Having just re-read Tolkien’s immortal The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I suddenly realized that there may be two sides to this story. That the book, which I enjoyed so much and read so many times, may just be an overly simplistic version of the history of Middle Earth, as told by the victors. So what if I tried to write down the history of the One Ring and the all-encompassing War of the Ring between Gondor and Morder from the perspective of a Mordorian orc?
I actually sat down and began writing the story, but I never got past the first page. No author, I.
Little did I know that the story I wanted to write was already written, published by a Russian author, Kirill Yeskov, in 1999. In it, just like in the version I envisioned but never wrote, Gandalf is a great manipulator; Aragorn is little more than a highway robber turned usurper; and the “evil empire” of Mordor is, in fact, a land of industry, science, and technology, despised by the magic-wielding but oft illiterate feudal lords of Middle Earth’s West.
In short, Yeskov wrote the story I wanted to write, only he did it much better than I could or would have. And Yeskov’s book is finally available in a (very) decent English translation, as a free download. I downloaded it yesterday, printed it, even bound it in the form of a little book, and now I am enjoying every page of it. Yes, surprisingly, it is actually a page-turner! And also an eye-opener.
I have no idea yet how the story will end. The ending will probably be a lot less neat and tidy than the ending of Tolkien’s version. But, it may also be a lot closer to “reality”.
I think it’s a fitting irony that Yeskov’s book was never officially published in English, as publishing houses feared the wrath of the Tolkien estate. When we say that history is written by the victors, what we really mean is that the victors are usually successful at preventing any version of history other than the official one from reaching bookshelves. It seems that the situation is no different in the case of Tolkien’s fantasy world.
Here’s a useful unit of measure that I just found out about, thanks to Bruce Schneier’s security blog: it’s called a micromort, a one-in-a-million probability of death. Curiously, according to the Wikipedia, your chances of dying on a train due to an accident are the same as your chances of dying due to cosmic radiation received while flying on a jet: 1 micromort every six thousand miles.
Two weeks ago, I took a stray cat to the Humane Society. I thought it was the right thing to do; we already have five of them, no friend of ours wanted a cat, and this stray was obviously not going to do well outdoors (when we first saw him, he was eating some scraps off the pavement in the middle of a street frequented by city buses.) He was also young, healthy, and friendly, so we had every hope that he would be adopted.
Our hopes were in vain. Today, I found out that he was put down after contracting a viral respiratory infection and some secondary bacterial infection that did not respond to antibiotics.
All we have now is this last picture, courtesy of the Humane Society:
Well, that’s the end of one little life. Wasn’t worth much, I guess.
Not sure what to do next time. Would he have had a better chance outside in -30 Centigrade weather?
Damn.
Earlier this week Egypt, a country of 80 million, collectively left the Internet.
I think this, more than anything, demonstrates that the days (if not the hours) of Mubarak’s regime are numbered. The damage this step causes to the Egyptian economy are likely quite considerable. And a number of other countries are worried: it appears that a significant share of the data traffic between Europe and Gulf oil states, as well as Asia, passes through Egypt. This connections aren’t yet affected, but who knows what happens next?
We live in interesting times.
The other day, I saw a report on the CBC about increasingly sophisticated methods thieves use to steal credit and bank card numbers. They showed, for instance, how a thief can easily grab a store card reader when the clerk is not looking, replacing it with a modified reader that steals card numbers and PIN codes.
That such thefts can happen in the first place, however, I attribute to the criminal negligence of the financial institutions involved. There is no question about it, when it’s important to a corporation, they certainly find ways to implement cryptographically secure methods to deny access by unauthorized equipment. Such technology has been in use by cable companies for many years already, making it very difficult to use unauthorized equipment to view cable TV. So how hard can it be to incorporate strong cryptographic authentication into bank card reader terminals, and why do banks not do it?
The other topic of the report was the use of insecure (they didn’t call it insecure but that’s what it is) RFID technology on some newer credit cards, the information from which can be stolen in a split second by a thief that just stands or sits next to you in a crowded mall. The use of such technology on supposedly “secure” new electronic credit cards is both incomprehensible and inexcusable. But, I am sure the technical consultant who recommended this technology to the banks in some bloated report full of flowery prose and multisyllable jargon received a nice paycheck.
I just ran this on my main server:
$ uptime 08:13:32 up 365 days, 19:56, 4 users, load average: 0.07, 0.05, 0.06
Yes, this means I last rebooted this server one year and 20 hours ago. (What was I doing, rebooting at 4 in the morning?)
Mind you, it won’t run uninterrupted much longer. An updated server is waiting to take its place, so that I can then take this guy down, thoroughly clean it (removing one year’s worth of accumulated dust and cat hair) and upgrade it as well.
There is a very icky treatment out there for a very difficult infection: it’s called fecal transplant, and apparently, it can be used to defeat an otherwise deadly, difficult infection.
Not good enough for the health bureaucrats in British Columbia, who, according to news reports, are barring physicians from applying this treatment, because according to them, the treatment is experimental and its safety cannot yet be ascertained.
Commendably cautious, you might say… but wait a cotton-picking minute, aren’t these the same health bureaucrats who spend public money to fund acupuncture and other forms of “alternative medicine”?
Tricky trumps icky, it seems.
This morning, I took this little guy to the Humane Society:
This young, unneutered tomcat showed up at our doorstep during the holidays, obviously homeless and hungry, but otherwise in good shape and friendly. We took care of him but the weather is getting colder, and spending much of his day in our tiny entry hall isn’t exactly a solution. We already have five cats, so adopting him was not a good idea.
On the way to the Humane Society, as the sun shone into the car, I noticed that he had blue-ish eyes. He was obviously part Siamese, but the blue eyes were news to me.
I hope he finds a good owner soon and lives a long and happy life.
I am reading the articles from the British Medical Journal about the Andrew Wakefield case. Wakefield was the British physician who published a fraudulent study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, causing a worldwide scare which may have resulted in the deaths of many unvaccinated children over the years.
What I didn’t know was that Wakefield wasn’t merely incompetent: he was a fraudster. According to the BMJ, he deliberately and fraudulently falsified data while being paid by a legal firm that was planning to sue the vaccine manufacturer.
I also do scientific research. My research (thankfully) has nothing to do with people, vaccines, or diseases; it’s about things like historical spacecraft or obscure aspects of gravity theory. Even so, I find the idea of altering or “massaging” my data, be it for fame or for profit, totally unthinkable and abhorrent. To do so when people’s lives are at stake… The likes of Wakefield not only undermine the credibility of the entire scientific community, they also put people’s lives at risk for monetary gain.
I wonder if Wakefield will ever face criminal charges. Perhaps he should.
One party-rule, proclaims The Guardian in its latest article about Hungary, and they’re not that terribly far from the truth: It seems to me that Mr. Orban is trying to build precisely that, demonstrating that of all Hungarian politicians, he is the one who bears the true legacy of the Kadar era. Indeed I think that this is the best way to describe Orban: he is Kadar’s posthumous revenge.
The Washington Post finally took notice: not one but two articles, an opinion piece and an editorial about my country of birth, the latter titled The Putinization of Hungary.
Once again, I wish I could disagree but I cannot. Hungary may have been ruled by the Socialist Party for the past eight years, but even though they are the formal successors of the once all-powerful Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, it’s not them but Orban’s Fidesz who carry the real legacy of the Kadar era.
Or perhaps both do (I certainly have few illusions about the purity of the Socialists), but the Socialists didn’t have the two-thirds parliamentary majority that Orban enjoys. Which gives Orban effectively unlimited power: with his two thirds majority, he can dismantle independent institutions and rewrite the country’s constitution.
Both of which he’s busy doing.
And I keep thinking that it was good that Hungary once had democratic government… too bad it didn’t last very long. Or am I succumbing to hype and writing democracy’s epitaph prematurely? This is one instance when I desperately, sincerely hope that I am badly wrong.
My Linux systems are all configured with an ages old program, fortune, giving me a “fortune cookie”, a random greeting or quotation from a database with thousands of entries, every time I log on.
This morning, I logged on to one of my Linux machines and I saw this quote from the immortal Sam Clemens, aka. Mark Twain:
“The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.”
If I didn’t know any better, I’d be tempted to think that the computer has a twisted sense of atheist humor and chose this greeting after looking at the calendar. Not that Mr. Clemens was wrong!
Anyhow, although I am an atheist, I hope I am not twisted, so I just wish a Merry Christmas to all my family and friends, and indeed, all good people.
Here’s a wonderful quote from Saturday Night Live’s impersonation of Julian Assange talking about Mark Zuckerberg: “What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? Let’s take a look. I give you private information about corporations for free. And I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”
SNL’s Assange also praised Time magazine for being on top of things, discovering Facebook “only weeks after your grandmother”.
It’s official: the work we are doing about the Pioneer Anomaly qualifies as popular science according to Popular Science, as they just published a featured article about it.
I admit that it was with a strong sense of apprehension that I began reading the piece. What you say to a journalist and what appears in print are often not very well correlated, as politicians know all too well. My apprehension was not completely unjustified, as the article contains some (minor) technical errors, misquotes us slightly in places, and what is perhaps most troubling, some of the work that it attributes to us was done by others (e.g., thermal engineers at JPL). These flaws notwithstanding (and this article fares better than most that appeared in recent years, I think), it is nice to have one’s efforts recognized.
In the pre-Internet days, when I traveled to a city that I never visited before, the first thing I did was to buy a copy of the local newspaper, and then read the local pages and some of the classifieds.
Now, thanks to the Internet, I can time travel the same way, without leaving my chair. For instance, I can browse the pages of the Ottawa citizen from 1973, the year my Mom and I visited this fine city. Not sure what is weirder… how much has changed or how much remained the same.
A sad anniversary: it was 38 years ago today that a human being landed on the Moon for the last time. Who’d have thought back then that nearly half a century (!) later we have yet to venture beyond low Earth orbit again?