Sep 302021
 

I have had it up to my eyeballs with misinformation about vaccines, mRNA vaccines in particular. People who up until 2020 could not tell the difference between acronyms like “RNA” and “WTF” suddenly became experts on molecular biology, capable of evaluating the professional literature and arriving at profound judgments, telling us that the vaccines are “fake” and such, or worse yet, they amount to “gene therapy”.

With all due respect, I first encountered the acronym “mRNA” (or its Hungarian equivalent, mRNS) not in 2020, not in 2019, but in 1980 or 81, from a Hungarian translation of Watson’s book on molecular biology of the gene.

Now granted, even if I had read that book cover-to-cover (I didn’t) it would not make me an expert on molecular biology. But I knew enough for the expression “mRNA vaccine” to make sense to me right away when it first showed up in news reports. In short, I know enough to spot the bullshit. Such as all that anti-vaccine scaremongering that has become ever so popular on the Interwebs lately.

Something similar happened 20 years ago, in the wake of 9/11. Many folks, especially Americans, who previously couldn’t tell Mohammed the prophet from Mohammed Ali, and who have never been in the same room with a textbook on comparative religion previously, suddenly became experts on Islam, making grand pronouncements about it being the religion of terror and all that. I first read a textbook on comparative religion back when I was 10 or so, from a 1927 2-volume tome on religions of the world:

This is volume one, titled “Primitive and cultural religions, Islam and Buddhism”. As with the Watson textbook, the images in this blog entry are of my own making, done just moments ago using my phone camera, of the actual books I have in my personal library.

Again, reading this book did not make me an instant expert. But it did give me enough background to spot the flood of bullshit that permeated the discussion after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Coming from a family and personal tradition that values learning, values impartial knowledge, it almost feels like physical pain, being confronted with such gross ignorance and outright lies each and every day. Enough already. Don’t listen to me, but don’t listen to the bullshit artists either. Listen to the actual experts (and not a cherry-picked subset of so-called experts who say what you want to hear). That’s what experts are for in an advanced scientific-technological society in which no human can be a master of all trades, and in which we rely on each other’s knowledge and experience.

Someone on Quora recently compared the anti-vaxxer movement to a hypothetical scenario on an airliner in distress: instead of following the crews’ instructions and donning oxygen masks, passengers stage a revolt, led by an “expert” who already knows better than the pilots how to fly the damn plane because he played with Microsoft Flight Simulator!

Groan.

 Posted by at 1:10 am
Sep 282021
 

I live in a condominium townhouse. We’ve been living here for 25 years. We like the place.

Our unit, in particular, is the middle unit in a three-unit block. The construction is reasonably sound: proper foundations, cinderblock firewalls between the units, woodframe construction within, pretty run-of-the-mill by early 1980s North American standards. We have no major complaints.

Except that… for the past several years, every so often the house wobbled a bit. Almost imperceptibly, but still. At first, I thought it was a minor earthquake (not uncommon in this region because it is still subject to isostatic rebound from the last ice age; in fact we did live through a couple of notable earthquakes since we moved in here.) But no, it was no earthquake.

I thought perhaps it was related to the downtown light rail tunnel construction? But no, the LRT tunnels are quite some ways from here and in any case, that part of the construction has been finished long ago.

But then what the bleep is it? Could I be just imagining things?

Our phones have very sensitive acceleration sensors. Not for the first time, I managed to capture one of these events. A little earlier this afternoon, I heard the woodframe audibly creak as the house began to move again. I grabbed my phone and turned on a piece of software that samples the acceleration sensor at a reasonably high rate, about 200 times a second. Here is the result of the first few seconds of sampling:

The sinusoidal signal is unmistakably there, confirmed by a quick Fourier-analysis to be a signal just above 3 Hz in frequency:

Like Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory, I can claim that no, I am not crazy, and in this case not because my mother had me tested but because my phone’s acceleration sensor confirms my perception: Something indeed wobbles the house a little, enough to register on my phone’s acceleration sensor, measuring a peak-to-peak amplitude of roughly 0.05 m/s² (the vertical axis in the first graph is in g-units.) That wobble is certainly not enough to cause damage, but it is, I admit, a bit unnerving.

So what is going on here? A neighbor engaging in some, ahem, vigorous activity? Our current neighbors are somewhat noisier than prior residents, occasionally training their respective herds of pygmy elephants to run up and down the stairs (or whatever it is that they are doing). But no, the events are just too brief in duration and too regular. Underground work, perhaps a secret hideout for the staff of the nearby Chinese embassy? Speaking of which, I admit I even thought that this ~3 Hz signal might be related to the reported cases of illness by embassy staff at several embassies around the world, but I just don’t see the connection: even if those cases are real and have an underlying common cause (as opposed to just mere random coincidences) it’s hard to see how a 3 Hz vibration can have anything to do with them.

OK, so I have a pretty good idea of what this thing isn’t, but then, what the bleepety-bleep is it?

 Posted by at 3:50 pm
Sep 282021
 

I began to see this recently. Web sites of dubious lineage, making you wait a few seconds before popping up a request to confirm that you are not a robot, by clicking “Allow”:

Please don’t.

By clicking “allow”, you are simply confirming that you are a gullible, innocent victim who just allowed a scamster to spam you with bogus notifications (and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of those notifications were designed to entice you to install software you shouldn’t have or otherwise do something to get yourself scammed.)

Bloody crooks. Yes, I stand by my observation that the overwhelming majority of human beings are decent. But those who aren’t are no longer separated from the rest of us by physical distance. Thanks to the Internet, all the world’s crooks are at your virtual doorstep, aided by their tireless ‘bots.

 Posted by at 2:59 pm
Sep 242021
 

Yes, you got that right. The title of this blog entry is not a mistake. And no, I didn’t suddenly turn into a relic Cold Warrior from the 1950s.

It is how I characterize Xi Jinping’s commie regime tonight.

It may be a “kinder, gentler” version of communism compared to Mao’s or Stalin’s (at least so long as you are not an Uyghur from Xinjiang province, enjoying your vacation in a concentration, oh, pardon me, re-education camp), but it is nonetheless a regime that does not refrain from the most despicable, criminal acts, including the taking of hostages.

In case anyone had any doubts on the matter…

Within hours after the United States dropped its extradition request and thus Meng Wanzhou of Huawei was released from house arrest in Canada (to her credit, she actually thanked Canada for upholding the rule of law), two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, have reportedly been released by China, finally allowed to leave after three years of captivity, despite the bogus allegations of spying against them.

How else can I describe such a regime other than hostage-taking commie bastards without resorting to obscenities?

Oh, I got it.

Rotten hostage-taking commie bastards.

 Posted by at 10:00 pm
Sep 192021
 

A little over 50 years ago, we were all excited in the city of my birth, Budapest. This fine city, home of the old continent’s first subway line (and the world’s first that was built from the onset as an all-electric system), was about to get a modern “metro”. Using Soviet technology, the M2 line was opened to great fanfare, providing a rapid connection from the center of town towards the eastern suburbs on the Pest side. The line was soon extended under the Danube, reaching the Buda side’s main railway station in 1972.

Why do I mention this in a blog entry about Ottawa’s LRT? Simple. This 50-year old system, using technology from the former USSR, has operated reliably ever since. I know from experience: for a while, I used to take it daily, back in the 1970s and the early 1980s. The expectation of urban travelers is that barring rare, major emergencies, the system should work like clockwork; and when an emergency disrupts system operations, service is restored within a matter of hours. This expectation was, in my experience, always met by the M2 line. The most serious accident on the line happened in 2016, when a train rear-ended another, injuring ten passengers. Even in the wake of this accident, service was rapidly restored, albeit with a speed reduction at the accident location while the ongoing investigation tried to determine the cause.

Fast forward to 2021, to the proud capital of Canada, a G7 nation, supposedly one of the most advanced economies in the world, certainly one of the richest, wealthiest nations. Ottawa used to have an extensive streetcar system. Like similar systems in so many cities around the world, this system was dismantled, wantonly destroyed in the late 1950s, when urban planners looked at streetcars as unwanted relics from the past.

Finally, in the 2010s the decision was made that Ottawa needs urban rail transport after all, and the Confederation Line was built. It was opened to the public after many delays in September, 2019. The initial, 13-station segment cost approximately 2.1 billion dollars.

And… well, until now I refrained from commenting because, you know, be patient, good people know what they are doing, sometimes a system has more kinks than anticipated, all that… but no longer. This 2.1 billion dollar system is a piece of crap.

It has had trouble when the weather was too warm. Define too warm? Well, 30 degrees Centigrade. It has had trouble when the weather was too cold. Never mind that Ottawa is one of the coldest capital cities in the world; a little bit of wintry weather below freezing was enough to cause  problems. It has had trouble with train doors, trouble with the rails, trouble with axles and who knows what else. And it now experienced its second derailment.

And no, don’t expect them to rapidly restore service, repairing the affected track and perhaps as a precaution, instituting a temporary speed reduction. No, we are told, the entire system will be shut down again for at least a whole week!

And I cannot decide (I don’t have enough information) if this is gross incompetence or tacit acknowledgment that the system has severe systemic problems, and that the derailment (second in two months!) was not so much a random accident but a result of a badly built track, unsafe trains, or some such cause.

In light of this, I wish they had just imported 50-year old Soviet technology. The darn things may not be pretty (they don’t actually look bad, mind you), may be a tad noisy, but they work. And work. And 50 years later, still work.

As opposed to this piece of… stuff.

And it’s not like railway technology is a new invention. Budapest’s old, 1896 line celebrated its 125th anniversary this year. London’s Underground is even older. And that’s just urban underground systems. So it’s not like some exotic new technology that still has issues. It’s just… I don’t know. Corruption? Incompetence? Just sheer bad luck? Whatever it is, I think the residents of our city deserve better. And those responsible should be held to account, if necessary, even criminally.

 Posted by at 7:11 pm
Sep 122021
 

I get it. Our standards change. Live and let live. We abhor racism and embrace differences. We recognize the crimes of the past.

But when the National Archives of the United States of America marks the country’s own Constitution as containing “potentially harmful language”, that’s so far beyond anything I would even remotely consider sane, I don’t even know how to describe it.

This is so far beyond insane, I have no words.

All I can say is that if the goal is to drive as many undecided people as possible into the camp of Trump voters, they found a singularly efficient way to accomplish that ignoble task.

Edit: And yes, I recognize that this is a blanket statement that applies to all Archive searches. Even so, I find it disturbing that this notice appears even for documents such as the US Constitution. The capability clearly exists not to show the notice for certain pages, as it is not present on explanatory pages of the Archives. Displaying this disclaimer so prominently on top of historical documents just sends the wrong message and provides unnecessary propaganda fodder. What’s wrong with a more discreet notice at the bottom? Or simply presenting, like so many sites do, a “terms and conditions” page when a user first connects, which could include this disclaimer? Showing it on every page, prominently over documents of great legal and historical significance is just… dumb. It reeks of “cancel culture”.

 Posted by at 1:21 am
Sep 112021
 

A few hours from now, it will be exactly 20 years since that fateful morning when, instead of going to bed after working through the night (I was very much a night owl in those days), I ended up spending the day glued to the television window on my old PC, running Windows XP and cable TV in a window, courtesy of a long obsolete ATI All-in-Wonder video card combining graphics with an analog TV tuner.

I had no doubt that the events of the day would change the world that we live in. What was not clear was how.

The good news: America’s “war on terror” by and large has to be considered a success. There have been no large-scale terrorist acts on US soil by militant Islamists since 9/11. But that’s pretty much where the good news end.

The bad news: Where should I begin?

First, the misguided occupation of Afghanistan. Yes, I know, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but it was pretty obvious even back then that it is not possible to do an occupation on the cheap. There is one way to occupy a hostile country: put a sizable garrison in every town and a guardpost at every intersection, maintain order, and respond ruthlessly to attacks on your forces. Now the thing is, not even the USSR was willing to make this level of effort, which is why their Afghanistan venture was a fiasco. As for America, whoever came up with the idea that you can bomb a country into democracy need to get their heads examined.

Second, the criminally insane war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. No, Hussein was not a nice fellow. But removing him created a regional power vacuum that the theocracy in Iran was all too eager to fill. The one good outcome of this is that it created a previously unimaginable rapport between Iran’s enemies, namely Israel and the Gulf states. Otherwise, all the Iraqi venture accomplished is a destabilization of the region, the consequences of which we still reap.

And speaking of places like the Gulf states, this is another one of the unpleasant consequences of 9/11: Perhaps more than ever, the “land of the free”, the United States, loves cozying up with despots and dictators. This was especially prevalent during the Trump era, as Trump seemed unnervingly comfortable with the likes of Putin or MBS, even as he denounced democratically elected leaders committed to the values of liberal democracy.

Thankfully, the misguided military ventures are over. Chaotic last few days notwithstanding, US troops are finally out of Afghanistan. There are very few things for which Trump deserves praise, but his decision to pull out of Afghanistan, his reluctance to start new wars, are commendable.

If only the United States could overcome its internal partisan division, it could again resume its role as “leader of the free world”, a free world that now faces the dual threat of rising authoritarianism in many Western democracies, and the rise of a leader more authoritarian than anyone since Mao in a China that is now an undisputed economic superpower.

But for that, millions of Americans would first have to abandon scary conspiracy theories about a stolen election or a COVID vaccine that is an attack on their rights and freedoms; and other millions of Americans would have to abandon their commitment to impose their increasingly intolerant “woke” values, their “cancel culture” on their neighbors. And their lessons would have to be repeated elsewhere, throughout the Western world. In short, we have to somehow relearn some basic ideas of a liberal democracy, such as the notion that our neighbors whose political priorities differ from ours are not inherently evil, they are not the enemy. Can this happen? Will this happen in an era of social media bubbles, bubbles often controlled by foreign adversaries and their divisive propaganda, turning us against each other?

But before I get too pessimistic, I look at the long term trends. Here we are, in 2021, 76 years after one of the most devastating wars in human history ended with the use of two atomic bombs. When I was a child in the late 1960s, early 1970s, no sane person in the world would have predicted that we would live to see 2021 without another great war, without nuclear Armageddon. Yet here we are, worrying not about mushroom clouds but about climate change, not about Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare but about microplastics hampering efforts to clean up rivers and wetlands, not about famines and “Soylent Green” but about lithium or rare earth production for our batteries and high tech gadgets, not about hostile AI running our lives but about semiconductor shortages hampering the automobile industry.

Still I have to wonder, was 9/11 a wasted opportunity? Could the US and the world have responded better? Undoubtedly, I think.

 Posted by at 1:12 am