Dec 312021
 

Y’all heard the joke: twenty-twenty-two,
It will be just like twenty-twenty, too.
But I really hope it will not be so.
We really just can’t give it another go.

 Posted by at 9:06 pm
Dec 242021
 

Although we are not religious, we celebrate Christmas.

And I still cannot think of a better way to celebrate Christmas than with the words of the astronauts of Apollo 8, and the sense of awe they felt when they became the first human beings ever in the history of our species to be completely cut off from Mother Earth, when their spaceship disappeared behind the Moon.

Earthrise from Apollo 8

Re-emerging, they read passages from the Book of Genesis to their audience, with Frank Borman concluding with the words:

[G]ood night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.

To me, this is the most beautiful Christmas message ever.

 Posted by at 2:38 am
Dec 242021
 

For the record: The Viktor Toth who has recently become quite popular on YouTube by placing his pet rat into a virtual reality harness and letting him play Doom is not me.

Even if I were inclined to do such an experiment with a live animal (I am not) it would be one of my cats, and the retro game of choice would be Duke Nukem.

You see, I was never really a fan of Doom.

 Posted by at 1:44 am
Dec 212021
 

Someone reminded me that 20 years ago, I made an honest-to-goodness attempt to switch to Linux as my primary desktop.

I even managed to get some of the most important Windows programs to run, including Microsoft office.

I could even watch live TV using my ATI capture card and Linux software. I used this Linux machine to watch the first DVD of The Lord of the Rings.

In the end, though, it was just not worth the trouble. Too many quirks, too much hassle. I preserved the machine as a VM, so I can run it even today (albeit without sound, and of course without video capture.) But it never replaced my Windows workstation.

I just checked and the installed browsers can still see my Web sites… sort of. The old version of Mozilla chokes on my personal Web site but it sees my calculator museum just fine. Konqueror can see both. However, neither of them can cope with modern security protocols so https connections are out.

Funny thing is, it really hasn’t become any easier to set up a really good, functional Linux desktop in the intervening 20 years.

 Posted by at 9:57 pm
Dec 202021
 

Though he passed away in September, I only learned about it tonight: Thanu Padmanabhan, renowned Indian theoretical physicist, is no longer with us. He was only 64 when he passed away, a result of a heart attack according to Wikipedia.

I never met Padmanabhan but I have several of his books on my bookshelf, including Structure Formation in the Universe and his more recent textbook Gravitation. I am also familiar with many of his papers.

I learned about his death just moments ago as I came across a paper by him on arXiv, carrying this comment: “Prof. T. Padmanabhan has passed away on 17th September, 2021, while this paper was under review in a journal.”

What an incredible loss. The brilliant flame of his intellect, extinguished. I am deeply saddened.

A tribute article about his life was published on arXiv back in October, but unfortunately was not cross-listed to gr-qc, and thus it escaped my attention until now.

 Posted by at 2:15 am
Dec 072021
 

Finally, Ottawa’s LRT is back in service again, operating more or less reliably, at more or less full capacity for a few weeks already, after a nearly two months long shutdown following the system’s second derailment in its mere two years of operation.

Let me celebrate this triumph (er, am I being too sarcastic?) with an archive photo from the city of my birth, Budapest, from 1966 or 67.

You see, back then, more than half a century ago, they were able to maintain nearly uninterrupted streetcar service at a major Budapest intersection, even if it took laying down temporary tracks as a new underground pedestrian passageway was constructed and in the process, a lot of the old infrastructure (water mains, sewage) was also replaced.

Why is it that maintaining uninterrupted service in 2021 in a G7 capital city is suddenly harder than rocket science?

 Posted by at 12:20 pm