Dec 202020
 

The year 2020 was certainly not… nice.

But there is a ray of hope. It arrived in the form of the mysterious metal monoliths that popped up all over the globe, most recently even here in our relative neighborhood, on Sherbrooke street in Montreal.

Similar monoliths appeared all over the planet, from British Columbia to Romania, from Iran to New Zealand.

And that makes me feel optimistic.

If, in a year like 2020, humanity can share a joke like this: people on all continents, from different cultures, can happily participate in a shared prank, a harmless diversion, making fun of it all… then, perhaps, there is hope for us yet.

 Posted by at 12:36 pm
Dec 202020
 

In the last several days, until I asked Google not to show it anymore, this ad appeared on just about every other Web page that I visited:

As near as I can tell, it is inviting me to visit a clickbait site with some brainless list of “amazing inventions”. (Yes, I blurred out the address on purpose, because I have no desire to offer them free publicity.)

But what’s with this picture? It is… horrifying to be honest. If it is supposed to be an amazing invention, I wonder if it is an unusually gross sex toy or perhaps some quack medicine device.

Well, whatever it is… Google, please stop. This thing is… gross. (The machine-generated human face that seems to hit the bullseye in the middle of the uncanny valley doesn’t help either.)

 Posted by at 12:26 pm
Dec 152020
 

A very nice article about our work on the Solar Gravitational Lens was published a few days ago on Universe Today, on account of our recent preprint, which shows quantitative results assessing the impact of image reconstruction on signal and noise.

Because the SGL is such an imperfect lens, the noise penalty is substantial. However, as it turns out, it is much reduced when the projected image area is large, such as when an exoplanet in a nearby star system is targeted.

While this is good news, the Sun’s gravitational field has other imperfections. We are currently working on modeling these and assessing their impact on noise. Next comes the problem of imaging a moving target: an exoplanet that spins, which is illuminated from varying directions, and which may have varying surface features (clouds, vegetation, etc.) Accounting for all these effects is essential if we wish to translate basic theory into sound scientific and engineering requirements.

So, the fun continues. For now, it was nice to see this piece in Universe Today.

 Posted by at 11:08 pm
Dec 132020
 

I am watching an almost surreal (but beautiful) video.

In this video, ambassadors to the United States from Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates appear, exchanging warm greetings on account of the third night of Hanukkah.

The year 2020 is memorable mostly for all the wrong reasons, but if this remains one of the lasting legacies of 2020 and the Trump presidency, then perhaps it wasn’t a wasted year after all. After all, normalization of relations between Israel and Arab nations has been a decades long dream and until recently, very few people thought we’d live to see any meaningful results.

Yet here it is: the ambassador of a Gulf Arab state, lighting three candles on a menorah. What an astonishing sight.

 Posted by at 9:11 pm
Dec 022020
 

According to the immortal Douglas Adams, God’s final message to His creation is simple: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

But there’s also another final message of sorts, the answer to the Ultimate Question about Life, Universe, and Everything: 42.

Recently, a researcher by the name of Michael Hippke analyzed the seemingly random bits that are contained in minute fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. His conclusion: there is no discernible pattern, no appearance of constants of nature, no detectable statistical autocorrelation. The message is random.

I beg to respectfully disagree. In the 512-bit segment published by Hippke, the bit sequence 101010 appears no fewer than eight, er, nine times (one occurrence split between two lines).

Now if we only knew the question to which the answer is 42…

 Posted by at 1:18 pm
Dec 012020
 

The giant Arecibo radio telescope is no more.

Damaged by a broken cable just a few weeks ago, the telescope completely collapsed today.

Incredibly sad news.

Completed in 1963, the telescope was 57 years old, just like me. I hope I will last a few more years, though.

 Posted by at 9:52 pm
Nov 192020
 

It was less than three weeks ago that I blogged about a terrifying milestone: the number of new COVID-19 cases reached 100,000 a day in the great United States.

And now here we are today, with over 192,000 new cases registered in the past 24 hours.

Frankly, this is beyond terrifying, especially considering the horrific stories of many COVID-19 survivors about the debilitating consequences of this disease.

 Posted by at 11:31 pm
Nov 192020
 

In recent years, I saw myself mostly as a “centrist liberal”: one who may lean conservative on matters of the economy and state power, but who firmly (very firmly) believes in basic human rights and basic human decency. One who wishes to live in a post-racial society in which your ethnicity or the color of your skin matter no more than the color of your eyes or your hairstyle. A society in which you are judged by the strength of your character. A society in which consenting, loving adults can form families regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. A society that treats heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals alike, without prejudice, without shaming, without rejection. A society in which covert racism no longer affords me “white privilege” while creating invisible barriers to those who come from a different ethnic background.

But then, I read that one of the pressing issues of the day is… the elimination of terms such as “master/slave” or “blacklist/whitelist” from the technical literature and from millions upon millions of lines of software code.

Say what again?

I mean… not too long ago, this was satire. Not too long ago, we laughed when overzealous censors (or was it misguided software?) changed “black-and-white” into “African-American-and-white”. Never did I think that one day, reality catches up with this Monty Pythonesque insanity.

It is one thing to fight for a post-racial society with gender equality. For a society in which homosexuals, transsexuals and others feel fully appreciated as human beings, just like their conventionally heterosexual neighbors. For a society free of overt or covert discrimination.

It is another thing to seek offense where none was intended. To misappropriate terms that, in the technical literature, NEVER MEANT what you suggest they mean. And then, to top it all off, to intimidate people who do not sing exactly the same song as the politically correct choir.

No, I do not claim the right, the privilege, to tell you what terms you should or should not find offensive. I am simply calling you out on this BS. You know that there is/was nothing racist about blacklisting a spammer’s e-mail address or arranging a pair of flip-flops (the electronic components, not the footwear) in a master/slave circuit. But you are purposefully searching for the use of words like “black” or “slave”, in any context, just to fuel this phony outrage. Enough already!

Do you truly want to fight real racism? Racism that harms people every day, that prevents talented young people from reaching their full potential, racism that still shortens lives and makes lives unduly miserable? Racial discrimination remains real in many parts of the world, including North America. Look no further than indigenous communities here in Canada, or urban ghettos or Native American villages in the United States. And elsewhere in the world? The treatment of the Uyghurs in China, the treatment of many ethnic minorities in Russia, human rights abuses throughout Africa and Asia, rising nationalism and xenophobia in Europe.

But instead of fighting to make the world a better place for those who really are in need, you occupy yourselves with this made-up nonsense. And as a result, you achieve the exact opposite of what you purportedly intend. Do you know why? Well, part of the reason is that decent, well-meaning people in democratic countries now vote against “progressives” because they are fed up with your thought police.

No, I do not wish to offer excuses for the real racists, the bona fide xenophobes, the closet nazis and others who enthusiastically support Trump or other wannabe autocrats elsewhere in the world. But surely, you don’t believe that over 70 million Americans who voted for Donald J. Trump 17 days ago are racist, xenophobic closet nazis?

Because if that’s what you believe, you are no better than the real racists, real xenophobes and real closet nazis. Your view of your fellow citizens is a distorted caricature, a hateful stereotype.

No, many of those who voted for Trump; many of those who voted for Biden but denied Democrats their Senate majority; many of those who voted for Biden but voted Democratic congresspeople out of the US Congress: They did so, in part, because you went too far. You are no longer solving problems. You are creating problems where none exist. Worse yet, through “cancel culture” you are trying to silence your critics.

But perhaps this is exactly what you want. Perpetuate the problem instead of solving it. For what would happen to you in a post-racial society with gender equality and full (and fully respected) LGBTQ rights? You would fade back into obscurity. You’d have to find a real job somewhere. You would no longer be able to present yourself as a respected, progressive “community leader”.

Oh, no, we can’t have that! You are a champion of human rights! You are fighting a neverending fight against white supremacism, white privilege, racism and all that! How dare I question the purity of your heart, your intent?

So you do your darnedest best to create conflict where none exists. There is no better example of this than the emergence of the word “cis” as a pejorative term describing… me, among other people, a heterosexual, white, middle-class male, especially one who happens to have an opinion and is unwilling to hide it. Exactly how you are making the world a better place by “repurposing” a word in this manner even as you fight against long-established terminology in the technical literature that you perceive as racist is beyond me. But I have had enough of this nonsense.

 Posted by at 10:46 pm
Nov 112020
 

Did Microsoft just offer me a 14-year old driver as a new update for Windows 10? Oh yes, they did!

But that’s okay… why fix something if it is not broken? Though I do wonder, if it is indeed a 14-year old driver, why was it not part of Windows 10 already? But never mind.

On the plus side, last night Windows 10 performed a feature upgrade along with security updates, and the whole upgrade process finished in well under half an hour; the reboot and installation phase only took a few minutes and so far, as far as I can tell, nothing is broken. Nice.

 Posted by at 12:36 pm
Nov 092020
 

I don’t consume much alcohol these days. Yet, I am compelled to admit, I had not one but two drinks this past week. One on Tuesday night as it became evident that the race was much tighter than pre-election polls suggested, and that there was a significant chance that my pessimistic prediction of a Trump victory would come true. The second was Saturday late morning when finally, the networks called it and named Joe Biden America’s president-elect; I felt a huge sense of relief and, well, the need for another Scotch.

Covers of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel from February 4, 2017 and November 7, 2020.

Part of the reason why I felt relieved was that the process was far more orderly than I feared. After all the dire predictions of civil unrest, even talk of civil war, what we saw Tuesday night and on subsequent days was an orderly counting of ballots. There were modest protests but by and large within the confines if the law; and Saturday was marked with spontaneous celebrations by Biden supporters but again, no news of significant violence or rioting or anything of that nature.

In other words, America behaved exactly like you expect a mature democracy to behave, and that was perhaps the best news of the week (other than the outcome, of course.)

Yet I continue to worry that the root causes that led to Trump’s presidency have not gone away. Rising inequality, the stagnation, even shrinking of the middle class continue to create tension. The entrenched two-party system, a system of primary elections that often favor extremists over moderates, few constraints on campaign financing continue to contribute to an increasingly acerbic political climate. Biden, with his decades of experience in the Senate, might be uniquely qualified to address some of these issues but I remain skeptical: There is only so much a 78-year old politician can do. And the very fact that America elected someone this old is itself a symptom of a broken system. So the fear remains: That the next “Trump” will not be an incompetent narcissist but someone with a dangerous agenda and the skills needed to avoid becoming a one-term president.

At least for now, this nonsense is over. Trump can still do (and I predict, will do) damage in his remaining two and a half months in office. The transition is unlikely to be smooth, which will make it that much harder for Biden’s team to take over on January 20. But then again, his experience will help, and pretty soon, we won’t hear much of Trump anymore, unless some of the predicted criminal prosecutions materialize. (Which may or may not be a good idea; Gerald Ford’s rationale for pardoning Nixon was just as sound back then as it is today.)

Finally, there is Kamala Harris making history. The first woman to be elected on a presidential ticket. The second person in American history with a significant non-European ancestry to serve as Vice-President. (Much to my surprise, I learned that the first such person was Herbert Hoover’s Vice-President, Charles Curtis, who had significant Native American ancestry; he served from 1929 to 1933.) Conservative CNN commentator SE Cupp summed it up perfectly with her personal anecdote about her 5-year old son who, after being told by his Mom that the people on TV are the ones chosen to lead the country now, asked, “But that’s a woman! Could you lead the country, Mom?”

Damn right she could.

 Posted by at 1:20 am
Oct 312020
 

The ghosts of Halloween have not completely forsaken us.

Here is the driveway of one of our neighbors tonight:

I doubt there will be many trick-or-treaters, but it was nonetheless good to see this. I especially appreciated the lit candle that turned a jack-o-lantern into, well, an actual jack-o-lantern. But it is really the other pumpkin that looked truly frightening. Thank you, neighbor!

 Posted by at 7:53 pm
Oct 312020
 

Would you like me to scare you into offering me some Halloween candy?

Here are some plots from the spreadsheet that I’ve been using to keep track of COVID-19 numbers since the spring.

I am tracking global figures, numbers in the US, Canada, the province of Ontario and my city Ottawa, as well as the country of my birth (and where our elderly parents live), Hungary.

The number of cases needs no explanation. The trends are not good. Hungary, in particular, appears to be a representative case of Europe in general, where the numbers began skyrocketing in recent weeks, per capita figures far exceeding those in Trump’s America. (So perhaps it’s not politics, after all.)

The daily growth rates are also alarming. The only place with a downward trend is Ottawa. Everywhere else, the growth rate is increasing. A constant growth rate in this chart would correspond to an exponential rise in the total number of cases; an increasing growth rate implies super-exponential behavior.

This is also reflected in the doubling rate. In this chart, the higher the number, the better; a high number of days means that the spread is slow. Again, with the exception of Ottawa, the numbers are trending downward (which is bad), or at best, are perhaps stagnating (in Canada and Ontario). And look at Hungary again! According to the latest data, the number of cases there doubles every 16-17 days or so, which is frightening.

These charts show seven-day averages. Again, the usual disclaimers apply. Country-to-country comparisons need to be made with care, due to differences in testing and reporting regimes. But the trends are another matter.

 Posted by at 1:14 pm
Oct 302020
 

The latest figures from the United States are scarier than ever. It appears Dr. Fauci was right when he predicted that the daily number of new cases will reach 100,000; according to the World-o-meter data that I’ve been following, there have been 101,461 new cases in the US today.

Does this mean that the United States officially qualifies as a “shithole country” with regards to how it manages the pandemic?

Not so fast.

Per capita, these figures mean 306 new cases per million people in the past 24 hours.

But look. Here’s my country of birth, Hungary. They were doing well until they weren’t. In the past 24 hours, they produced 3,286 infections. For a country with only 9.65 million people, that’s a lot. So much, in fact, that at 340 cases per million people, they are actually ahead of the United States. (What a relief: America is not number one.)

And wait! Before you jump to the conclusion that Mr. Orban’s illiberal populism is to blame, look at France. In the past 24 hours, they produced a staggering 49,215 new infections. Granted, that’s less than half the number of new cases in the US. But they only have less than one fifth the population! So per capita, their figures translate into a truly whopping 754 new cases per million people.

So perhaps it’s not politics, after all.

None of that excuses Mr. Trump as he mocks experts and holds “super spreader” campaign events. Perhaps 306 is less than 340 or 754, but it is still a lot of people. And as a result, around a thousand Americans die every day who could otherwise have lived. Clearly, the country could do a better job.

Canada, too. Perhaps our statistics look better than American statistics, but there is no room for complacency. This second wave is hitting us hard, much harder than the spring outbreak, and there is no sign of it ending anytime soon. On the national level, the rate of new infections is below 100 per million people, but it’s much higher in hotspots. Today’s breaking news: The province of Manitoba registered 350 cases per million, exceeding the US average.

A vaccine may or may not be coming soon. Even if it does, it will likely be imperfect, offering limited immunity. And it will take months for a mass vaccination program to reach the requisite level for vaccine-induced “herd immunity”. Long story short, the end is not yet in sight. This is likely going to get worse, perhaps a lot worse, before it gets better.

But it’s not politics, people. Wear those damn masks. Wash your hands. Keep away from other people. Resist the temptation to visit grandma on her birthday or hold a large Christmas family dinner. For crying out loud, this is not some backdoor to communism. You are not a lesser human, a less manly man if you wear a mask and keep your “social distance”. This is centuries-old science, which is how human society was able to cope with past epidemics. Ignore it and you may be directly responsible for infecting, perhaps crippling, even killing your loved ones.

 Posted by at 9:55 pm
Oct 302020
 

I don’t usually write about such matters, but a letter like this one is always a nice one to get even when there is no raging pandemic:

Let this serve as a public service reminder: If you are, like me, in your fifties, especially if you are a male, with a sedentary lifestyle (spending your days in your office chair), perhaps overweight: You are at risk. Early detection may mean the difference between surviving to a ripe old age in good health vs. dying before you get to enjoy life as a pensioner.

 Posted by at 5:53 pm
Oct 282020
 

My revulsion over Trump notwithstanding, every once in a while, when I am confronted with the blatant intolerance of “cancel culture” and the frequent dishonesty of “progressives”, I do feel that the Trumpists have a point.

Case in question: On October 13, 2020, SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett responded to a question concerning sexual orientation by stating the following: “I have no agenda, and I do want to be clear that I have never discriminated on the basis of sexual preference and would not ever discriminate on the basis of sexual preference. Like racism, I think discrimination is abhorrent.”

Progressive outrage was swift. Sexual “preference”? Sexual orientation is not a preference. You do not choose to be gay, queer, or bisexual. True. (Though allow me to observe that pedophiles also do not choose to be sexually attracted to children. No, I absolutely do not equate a loving relationship between consenting adults and the abuse of children. Just making a factual observation, a rhetorical point if you wish, highlighting that “orientation” does not, by itself, make a person’s sexual behavior socially or legally acceptable and that sexual orientation notwithstanding, a person can choose, or prefer, to refrain from committing unlawful acts. Besides, if sexuality was just a matter of preference, would that make persecution acceptable? Is it okay to persecute on the basis of religion, which is obviously a matter of preference? Which is why, I think, the “consenting adults” standard is far more appropriate than any distinction between orientation vs. preference when we define what is legal, socially acceptable, and protected as a basic human right. But, I digress.)

So here is the thing. Here is how Webster’s online dictionary defined the word “preference” as late as September 28, 2020, according to the Wayback Machine:

And here is how the definition changed on or before October 14 (when the Wayback Machine next captured the page) and what it says today:

Can you spot the difference?

Yes, somehow magically, overnight maybe, the word “preference” acquired an offensive meaning that was previously unknown to the editors of Merriam-Webster. The explanatory paragraph states that “The term preference as used to refer to sexual orientation is widely considered offensive in its implied suggestion that a person can choose who they are sexually or romantically attracted to.”

If your conservative friends respond with “what the [expletive]!”, I think they have every right to be upset. This kind of altered reality smells like the work of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984, or the altered photographs of the Stalin era with their vanishing commissars. In any case… “widely considered” by whom? (Expressions like this are actively discouraged by Wikipedia as weasel words, expressions of anonymous authority that should be avoided in encyclopedic definitions.)

It is one thing to condemn bigotry and racism. It is another thing to actively search for opportunities to be offended, even altering reality if that’s what it takes. This is not tolerance. This is virtue signaling. This is phony outrage, cheap political theater. The fact that the “progressive left” sinks this low, feels justified to sink this low (because, you know, Trump!) is sickening.

Of course there is a charitable explanation: Perhaps Webster’s simply responded to the “facts on the ground”, the criticism of Judge Barrett serving as a reminder to check, and update, this dictionary entry. But even if that were the case, shouldn’t such an update be based on more than a single instance of a political firestorm in the final weeks of a hotly contested US election cycle? Was it really necessary to make this change with such urgency? Given the fact that the entry directly relates to an unfolding, current political event, didn’t that deserve at least a footnote? Or perhaps just wait two weeks until the (badly rushed) confirmation process is over?

Bah. Who cares about such niceties, when there is such a wonderful opportunity to engage in righteous shaming.


NB: The screen captures above are mine. They are slightly altered (I removed commercial banners and information related to my personal privacy.) Their content was not manipulated.

 Posted by at 1:24 pm
Oct 192020
 

Since when is listening to the scientists a bad thing?

Now as to the claim that if he listened to the scientists, he’d have tanked the economy… here is what Mr. Trump’s pandemic response accomplished with respect to the US economy:

Compare this against China, where the totalitarian government, to their credit, actually listened to the scientists:

Even Canada, with a much less spectacular pre-pandemic economic performance than the United States, fared much better than our southern neighbor on which much of our economy depends:

So I suppose, Mr. Trump, you just gave millions of thinking Americans another reason to vote for Mr. Biden. I’d laugh but… neither the state of the US economy nor the number of dead, rapidly approaching a quarter million, qualify as laughing matter. Not to mention the seemingly inevitable march towards an increasingly illiberal, increasingly authoritarian America, driven by structural causes that go back decades and which a Biden Administration is just as unlikely to address as preceding administrations.

 Posted by at 1:21 pm
Oct 182020
 

I rarely remember my dreams. It was therefore striking when this morning I woke up from a vivid dream. In my dream, I visited my long dead grandmother’s old apartment, except that she was very much alive, sitting in front of a desk facing the window of her room. I stood at her doorway, not wanting to get any closer, COVID-19 and all. I said to her that we should keep our distance, and at first she nodded but then, bah, she approached me anyway with the intent to hug and kiss me. Not having any better ideas, I quickly held up the sheet of paper or book or whatever it was that I had in my hands, so that instead of kissing each other on the cheek, we ended up kissing through that paper object. I truly was worried that if we are careless, we risk her frail health.

In actuality, my grandmother, who was born in 1901, passed away 26 years ago. I was wondering what prompted this dream. Then I realized: last night, I saw an image on Twitter, a 1908 Canadian painting titled Mrs. Davies at the Sewing Machine, by Albert Henry Robinson.

Not quite the same as my grandmother’s room, but it has the same vibe, same atmosphere.

What an unusual dream.

Yes, I loved my grandmother very much. But I don’t think I ever saw her using a sewing machine.

 Posted by at 12:46 pm
Oct 112020
 

I learned the other day that Jeff Lynne was made an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Lynne is one of the founders of the supergroup Electric Light Orchestra. Though there were inevitable changes and periods of inactivity, ELO has been in business for a remarkable 50 years.

I first “met” ELO in the mid-1970s when my uncle returned to Hungary from a trip to Canada. He brought a few records, including ELO’s On The Third Day, and he let me make a cassette copy.

This was my first encounter with ELO’s brand of progressive rock, a mix of pop rock and classical instrumentation. It was instant love on my part. Their interpretation of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt, in particular, left a lasting impression. Incidentally, it also increased my appreciation for classical music.

These days, I often listen to ELO when I am working. It works better than almost any other piece of music, helping me focus on my work. Especially useful when I am working on a difficult problem, whether it is physics or a tough code debugging exercise. As a matter of fact, I was actually listening to ELO when I first heard the news.

I suppose I cannot call Mr. Lynne Sir because for that, he’d have had to be made a Knight of the OBE, not a mere Officer. Even so, all I can say is that it’s an award well-deserved. Thank you for the music, Mr. Lynne, OBE.

 Posted by at 6:27 pm