Here I am, reading a very nice letter from a volunteer who is asking me to share a link on my calculator museum Web site to cheer up some kids:
And then, instead of doing as I was asked to do, I turned to Google. Somehow, this message just didn’t smell entirely kosher. The article to which I was supposed to link also appeared rather sterile, more like an uninspired homework assignment, with several factual errors. So I started searching. It didn’t take very long until I found this gem:
Then, searching some more, I came across this:
Or how about this one:
Looks like Ms. Martin has been a busy lady.
So no, I don’t think I’d be adding any links today.
Epic tales tend to be one sided. Hobbits: good, orcs: evil. Rebel Alliance: good, Galactic Empire: evil. And so on.
Except that sometimes, we do get a glimpse of the story from the perspective of the other side.
The conversations between orcs that we witnessed in later chapters of the Lord of the Rings kind of humanized them: they were not necessarily nice guys, but they were, well, foot soldiers in an army like foot soldiers in any other army. Russian novelist Kirill Neskov must have been thinking the same thing when he wrote The Last Ringbearer, a novel in which we learn that Mordor is a peaceful country undergoing an industrial revolution, which is threatened by backward, war-mongering imperialists led by Gandalf, who is seeking “a final solution to the Mordorian problem”. Wow.
As for Star Wars, I always wondered: When the Death Star was destroyed, for instance, how many innocent people: children, civilian employees, family members, cooks, nurses, doctors, and so on, were destroyed along with the artifact? More than that, what if the canonical account is really a one-sided, distorted version of the real story, and the Rebel Alliance is just a bunch of terrorists while the Galactic Empire is really a peaceful, progressive civilization representing law and order?
Apparently, I am not the only one with these thoughts. Here is an amazing short animation of a battle between the Empire and the rebels… from the Imperial perspective:
What can I say? Let’s hope the good guys win… whoever they are.
The editors of Physical Review D decided that our paper about the stability of boson condensate stars: specifically, a diagram that shows 36 simulated cases, deserves to be featured on their new Kaleidoscope page for February 2015:
Why would a perfectly good airplane, flying along its designated route in broad daylight over Europe, suddenly decide to descend in an orderly fashion until it flew into the French Alps?
Maybe we will find out when the black boxes are analyzed. (One reportedly has been found already.) Given the controlled nature of the descent and the fact that the aircraft never deviated from its planned route, I fear that it will turn out to be something blatantly stupid and trivial, such as the autopilot’s altitude hold being accidentally disengaged, or the wrong value entered.
No, you didn’t miss anything in the news. Queen Elizabeth II is still the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom or, for that matter, Canada.
The monarch who was laid to rest is none other than Richard III, the last British monarch to have been killed in battle on home soil, 530 years ago this year.
His remains, however, were only found in 2012 and were not positively identified until some time after.
And now, Richard III has found his final resting place.
It is one of the least productive ways to use one’s time. I am talking about upgrades that are more or less mandatory, when a manufacturer ends support of an older version. So especially if the software in question is exposed to the outside world, upgrading is not optional: the security risk associated with using an unsupported, obsolete version is quite significant.
Today, I was forced to upgrade all my Web sites that use the Joomla content management system, as support for Joomla 2.5 ended in December, 2014.
What can I say. It was not fun. I am using some custom components and some homebrew solutions, and it took the better part of the day to get through everything and resolve all compatibility issues.
And I gained absolutely nothing. My Web sites look exactly like they did yesterday (apart from things that might be broken as a result of the upgrade, that is.) I just wasted a few precious hours of my life.
A strange new world in which the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran appears to have a much better grasp of the Constitution of the United States of America than the ever so patriotic, ever so constitution-defending lot of Republican senators who undertook to send a letter to Iran in an attempt to undermine their own president.
I did not believe that I could become more disenchanted with Stephen Harper’s government, but I was wrong.
Two major legislative items on the Harper agenda this spring are tougher criminal sentences and Bill C-51.
Tougher sentences? Is this really the biggest problem facing Canada? Especially considering that violent crime in this country has been consistently on the decline for the past four decades or more?
As for Bill C-51, the government’s proposed anti-terrorism bill, it is taking this country to a whole new territory by turning our security intelligence service into a de facto secret police, among other things.
Is this really Mr. Harper’s vision of Canada? A petty, vindictive police state? Or is this just cynical politicking in an election year? If so, are Canadians truly this easily frightened into giving up basic liberties for the illusion of security?
I cannot even begin to describe how incredibly disappointed I, a one-time conservative voter, am with Mr. Harper and his Conservative Party.
Sadly, my disappointment extends also to Mr. Trudeau and his Liberal Party’s cowardly decision to support C-51. It is incomprehensible, to be honest, and for the first time in my life, it makes me seriously contemplate voting for the NDP. (Unfortunately, if too many people think like I do, the vote on the left will again be split, and Harper stands a chance to remain in power for another five years. May the powers that be and the Giant Spaghetti Monster have mercy on us if that happens.)
What I would really like to vote for, however, is a conservative government that eschews ideology in favor of fact-based governance. One that does not resort to low-brow populism. One that does not use fear to justify legislation that undermines fundamental rights. One that pursues an agenda of international cooperation, not narrow-minded petty vindictiveness. We used to have conservatives like that in this country. It’s time for them to wake up and return.
I am still digesting the news, which I received while in Hungary, that Leonard Nimoy, aka. Mr. Spock, is no longer with us.
And now there is breaking news that Harrison Ford, aka. Han Solo, aka. Indiana Jones, crashed while flying solo in a vintage WW2 aircraft in California. The good news: according to the LA Fire Department, his injuries were moderate and he was alert as he was transported to hospital.
Last month, something happened to me that may never happen again: I had not one but two papers accepted by Physical Review D in the same month, on two completely different topics.
The first was a paper I wrote with John Moffat, showing how well his scalar-tensor-vector gravity theory (STVG, also called MOG) fits an extended set of Milky Way rotational curve data out to a radius of nearly 200 kpc. In contrast, the archetypal modified gravity theory, MOND (Mordehai Milgrom’s MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) does not fare so well: as it predicts a flat rotation curve, its fit to the data is rather poor, although its advocates suggest that the fit might improve if we take into account the “external” gravitational field due to other galaxies.
The other paper, which I wrote together with an old friend and colleague, Eniko Madarassy, details a set of numerical simulations of self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates, which may form exotic stars or stellar cores. There has been some discussion in the literature concerning the stability of such objects. Our simulation shows that they are stable, which confirms my own finding, detailed in an earlier paper (which, curiously, was rejected by PRD), namely that the perceived instability arises from an inappropriate application of an approximation (the Thomas-Fermi approximation) used to provide a simplistic description of the condensate.
Oh, and we also had another paper accepted, not by Physical Review D, but by the International Journal of Modern Physics D, but still… it is about yet another topic, post-Galilean coordinate transformations and the analysis of the N-body problem in general relativity. Unlike the first two papers, this one was mostly the work of my co-author, Slava Turyshev, but I feel honored to have been able to contribute. It is a 48-page monster (in the rather efficient REVTeX style; who knows how many pages it will be in the style used by IJMPD) with over 400 equations.
All in all, a productive month insofar as my nonexistent second career as a theoretical physicist is concerned. Now I have to concentrate on my first job, the one that feeds the cats…
Notice to Web advertisers: If you stick a video on a Web page that starts with blaring noise in the middle of the night, the only thing you accomplish is that I close the bleeping page in a mad panic, and I make sure never to visit it again.
Moments ago, this is what happened when I visited a page on the Montreal Gazette’s Web site, trying to read an article, only to have a car commercial start without any interaction on my part, at maximum volume.
I don’t know what car was being advertised. I don’t even care. I just swore and scrambled to click the Close button.
This is unpleasant even during the day, insanely annoying late at night when you worry about waking up family members, for instance.
I hope that one day, the idiots who believe this form of advertising is appropriate will all have their eardrums pierced in a most painful manner by excessive noise.
It appears though that I am not alone: there is a study suggesting that such loud ads are bad for business.
As for me, against my better judgment, I just decided to install AdBlock Plus on Chrome. Let’s see if it works as advertised.
As I travel to the UAE frequently these days, it is obviously of interest to me when I read about an American facing a felony charge in that country for a Facebook post he made in the US.
It is true that the UAE is not a democratic country. There are no political freedoms there, and opposition activists are sometimes incarcerated. However, the country is by no means a police state. On the contrary, they are proud to have found ways to reconcile conservative Muslim traditions with a modern, fairly tolerant, open 21st century society. As a foreigner, unless you are in the habit of passing bad cheques or farting in elevators, you really have to go out of your way to offend before UAE authorities decide to throw the book at you.
This American may have done exactly that, by posting deeply offensive remarks, directly insulting his UAE employer and management. Such speech may be protected under the US constitution (or not; not even the First Amendment protects false accusations) but the UAE is not the US. The fact that he made the offensive Facebook posts while in the US is an interesting twist, but I don’t think it is sufficient to get the charges dropped.
Still, now that the case has attracted international attention, my suspicion is that he will not receive a jail sentence: his apology will be accepted and he will simply be deported from the country. (His frozen wages, which prompted his outburst in the first place, will probably remain frozen, however.)
Benjamin Netanyahu warned the United States, in his unusually (and rather inappropriately) partisan address to Congress, that Iran’s nuclear ambitions represent an existential threat to Israel.
How many times do you cry wolf before others stop taking you seriously?
Back in 1993 (!), Netanyahu told the world that Iran would develop a nuke by 1999. That, of course, was 16 years ago.
Just to be clear, I have no illusions nor delusions about the Iranian regime. It is a dangerous regime that supports unsavory causes, not to mention genuine terrorists, around the world. And they certainly threatened Israel in the past.
However, I do not believe that the Iranian regime is planning to nuke Israel. As a matter of fact, I suspect that they are aiming to remain a “threshold” nuclear power for the foreseeable future: that is, develop the technological foundations so that they are capable of producing nuclear weapons on short notice, use their nuclear program as a bargaining chip, but avoid building actual weapons.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s political stunt is probably causing more damage to Israel than anything the ayatollahs could dream up. By playing a divisive political game in Washington, Netanyahu risks losing the one thing Israel cannot afford to lose under any circumstances: bipartisan support in Washington. For this reason, it seems to me that Benjamin Netanyahu represents a greater existential threat to Israel than any Iranian nuke.
Five days ago, I was sitting on an Emirates Airlines flight from Dubai to Budapest.
Our flight took an unusual route. Normally (well, at least within my limited experience) such flights take a route north of Iraq, flying over Iranian airspace towards Turkey. Not this time: We flew across the Saudi desert instead, then turned north over the Sinai peninsula before entering Turkish airspace and turning northwest again. I was wondering about that kink in our trajectory: was it weather or perhaps some airspace over the Mediterranean was closed for military reasons?
As a service to business class customers, Emirates provides a limo service to the destination of your choice on arrival. I was wondering how I would find the limo pick-up location, but it was easier than I thought: the chauffeur was waiting for me at the customs exit, holding up a sign bearing my name. During the journey to my hotel, he told me about his son who wishes to become a particle physicist at CERN. So for a while, we were discussing the Higgs boson and teraelectronvolts, instead of more customary topics, like Hungarian politics.
I rented a car in Budapest, for my mother and I to take a short trip to southern Hungary, to visit my mother-in-law. As we had the car for a whole weekend, on Sunday we decided to take another small trip, this time to the north of Budapest, the small but historical city of Visegrád.
I used to live in Visegrád, from 1974 to 1977, mostly in this building:
At the time, this building served as a resort owned by the Hungarian Industrial Association. As a member of a crafts artisan cooperative, my mother was entitled to vacation in this place, which we did in the spring of 1974. This is how she came to meet my stepfather who at the time was the manager of this facility. To make a long story short, we lived in the manager’s apartment for several years, while my parents built a new house in the same town. I have fond memories of this place.
Today, it serves as a home for the elderly. It seems to be well taken care of. Much to my surprise, one of its terraces appears to have been converted into a chicken coop, complete with a rather loud rooster:
Other than these two excursions and a brief visit to a 91-year old friend who recently had a serious health crisis, I spent most of my time at my parents’ place, a small apartment on the Buda side, nearly filled by a giant dog and his favorite toy:
My parents are very fond of this animal. He is nice, but I remain committed to cats. They are quieter, smell nicer, and require a whole lot less maintenance.
And all too soon, I was on another airplane, flying “business class” on British Airways to London. I had to put “business class” in quotation marks, as there was ridiculously little legroom on this middle-aged A320:
At least, the middle seats were converted into an extra tray instead.
And the flight left Budapest nearly an hour late. The reason? The air crew arrived in Budapest late the previous night, and they had to have their mandatory rest. This presented a potentially serious problem for me: the possibility that I would miss my connecting flight, which, to make things worse, was purchased separately. I probably broke some records at Heathrow Airport as I managed to make it from the arrival gate in Terminal 3 to the Terminal 2 departure gate in only 32 minutes, which included a bus ride between terminals and going through security. I made it with about 10 minutes to spare. I checked and I was told that my suitcase made it, too.
I have to say, while I like both Air Canada and British Airways, their service doesn’t even come close to the quality of service I enjoyed on Emirates or Etihad. And I am not just referring to legroom or the age of the aircraft (the Emirates flight to Budapest was a really aged A330 and the seats, while a great deal more comfortable than these British Airways seats, were nonetheless a little cramped) but also the attentiveness of the staff on board.
Still, the flight was pleasant (except for some rather severe turbulence near the southern trip of Greenland), and some eight hours later, I was back in sunny snowy Ottawa. The land of deep freeze, where the Rideau Canal is breaking all kinds of records, having been open for well over 50 consecutive days already.
I am back from another round of globe-trotting. I spent a week in the UAE, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, followed by a very brief detour to Budapest to visit my parents.
On arrival to Dubai, we landed nearly an hour late. The reason: a massive sandstorm, which still blanketed the city the next day. Sandstorms can be just as scary and dangerous as snowstorms here in Ottawa: they can reduce visibility to near zero, and the sand can cover roadways in no time. In fact, sand is worse than snow in one respect: it does not melt away.
I was taken to Abu Dhabi by car and during that trip, I saw the rarest of desert wonders: rain.
I was unable to book a room in the hotel of my choice in Abu Dhabi, as most hotels were full due to some defense exhibition. I did, however, find not a room, but a whole apartment at a very modest price in downtown Abu Dhabi, in a brand new apartment hotel called Bin Majid Hotel Apartments (second building from the left):
I had a one bedroom apartment, fully equipped, with a beautiful view of the sea:
Around the hotel, I befriended several cats. OK, maybe befriended is too strong a term, but one of them was certainly friendly for a while. It was a mostly white cat with a tabby tail; young, probably, but also rather small and skinny. When I saw this cat for the second time and let her (?) sniff my fingers, she would not stop following me. She rubbed against my leg, dropped on her side onto my shoes, and even when I picked her up and placed her back on a safe sidewalk, she continued to come after me. Only after I picked her up and put her onto a stone ledge did she take offense: she jumped off the ledge and disappeared under a parked car. I hope I did not offend her too deeply. I have not seen her afterwards. However, on my last morning in Abu Dhabi, I went looking for her and found instead another, equally tiny and skinny male cat: obviously an adult male, it was a tabby with a heavy limp and only one functioning eye. I felt heartbroken for these cats, although I have been assured that in the UAE, cats are generally not treated badly.
As always, the food in the UAE was both tasty and spectacular. One evening, a colleague took me to a restaurant recently opened by one of his friends. Here, we were treated with a spectacular feast:
Yum! My only regret is that I couldn’t eat it all. (Actually that’s not true: my other regret is that I came back heavier than I left, which is most unfortunate but not at all unusual when visiting the UAE.)
Then all too soon, it was time to leave. I boarded a direct flight from Dubai to Budapest, a recently introduced route by Emirates Airlines. After take-off, I enjoyed a spectacular view of downtown Dubai, dominated by the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa, from my airplane window. Sadly, my attempts to take a picture were not very successful.
And just like that, this part of my journey under the desert sun, a few very busy workdays in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, was over.
Today, I successfully hacked one of my Rogers cable decoder boxes. No, not to do anything illegal, just to get composite video and demultiplexed stereo audio out of them, to make them more usable with the dual-tuner TV card that is in my desktop workstation.
This is the first time ever that I used the services of a custom printed circuit board manufacturer. My design worked on the first try. I am mighty proud of myself.
Vaccinations are not without risk, some say. Why should the evil government compel me to expose my child to a known risk, they ask. Why is it my problem if someone else’s child is not vaccinated, they argue.
Well… it boils down to simple math, really. Suppose that once infected, a person remains infectious for a period of time denoted by \(\delta t\). The virulence of the disease is measured by the number of people that a single patient can infect during this period of time. It is called the basic reproduction number, denoted by \(R_0\). If this number is greater than one, we have the potential for an epidemic.
So then, after some time \(t\) has elapsed, the number \(N(t)\) of people who are infectious at that moment \(N(t)=N_0R_0^{t/\delta t}\), if \(N_0\) was the number of infected people at \(t=0\). At least this will be the correct number during the early stages of the epidemic; later, infection rates slow down as a growing number of people will have already caught the disease and the survivors will have developed immunity to it.
But we are interested in the early stages indeed, because the idea is to prevent an epidemic in the first place. So this simple model is adequate.
Now what happens when you vaccinate people? Even if everyone gets vaccinated, vaccines are not 100% effective. If the efficiency of a vaccine is given by \(\epsilon\) (a number between 0 and 1, with 1 meaning 100% efficiency), the aforementioned formula is modified: \(N(t)=[(1-\epsilon)R_0]^{t/\delta t}\). If \((1-\epsilon)R_0<1\), we win: an epidemic is avoided.
But what happens when not everyone gets vaccinated? Some people obviously cannot be: very young babies, people with compromised immune systems, etc. Let’s say the vaccination rate is given by \(\rho\). Once again, the formula for \(N(t)\) needs to be revised: \(N(t)=[(1-\epsilon\rho)R_0]^{t/\delta t}\).
And this is where the problem lies: if \((1-\epsilon\rho)R_0>1\), the potential for an epidemic exists.
Take the case of measles, for which \(R_0=12…18\). Even if we take the lower limit of the given range, \(R_0=12\), it is one of the most virulent contagious diseases out there. The measles vaccine is supposedly 95% effective: \(\epsilon=0.95\). So then, \((1-\epsilon)R_0=0.6\), and we are good: in a fully vaccinated population, measles would disappear in short order. This is indeed what happened when measles vaccinations became common in much of the world starting in the 1970s.
But now, let us think about \(\rho\). The math is easy: If \(\rho<0.965\) (that is, if more than 3.5% of the population are unvaccinated), \((1-\epsilon\rho)R_0>1\). Herd immunity is lost: the disease spreads.
And lest we forget, measles is a very deadly disease. Parents who play Russian roulette with their children on the basis of unsubstantiated fears concerning the vaccine’s effectiveness and side effects forget that often the only reason their child survives the infection is because they have access to first-world health care… the same health care that would have prevented the illness in the first place, if not for the parents’ arrogant stupidity.
These parents should be reminded that in poorer parts of the world, their counterparts often risk their lives to get their children vaccinated. Like parents in Somalia who, defying a ban on polio vaccination by al-Shabaab, smuggle their children to government-controlled areas to get the life-saving vaccine. Obviously these Somali parents are a lot smarter, a lot wiser than first-world anti-vaxxers, be it new age parents who prefer “happy thoughts” (or whatever) over medically approved methods, or nutty right-wingers who distrust the government on everything.
In short, if your political or religious views, or your scientific illiteracy compel you to be as stupid as a doorknob, please find a way to express your stupidity without endangering the health and lives of others.
Canadian liberals, rejoice: The network often dubbed “Fox News North” is no more. Reportedly, Sun News Network will stop broadcasting as early as 5 AM Eastern time this (Friday) morning.
I am certainly no fan of right-wing ideological propaganda and hatemongering, so it’s not like I will personally miss Sun News. But I still don’t cherish the idea that it was forced to close, after the CRTC denied it a license that would have granted the network a more lucrative spot on the cable dial. A core concept in a democracy is that even voices we despise can be heard. And if your views are based on real values, surely they would not be shaken by the fact that there was a news channel out there that occasionally challenged them.
To be sure, Sun News wasn’t exactly high quality television, but still… I don’t think their demise will make Canada a better place. Not to mention the 200+ jobs that are lost as a result.
As the fighting in Ukraine intensifies, we often hear Russia’s complaint: that the West, gloating over its “victory” at the end of the Cold War, is encircling Russia and is imposing its will upon the country.
But then the other day, I was reading another piece of news about a planned G7 meeting and it hit me. Imposing its will? Nonsense. The West welcomed Russia. It accepted Russia as a full-fledged member of the international community. It even made Russia a member of the G8, for crying out loud.
But this was not good enough for Mr. Putin’s Russia. Being a member of the international community means accepting its rules (even when you are the United States of America, much to the chagrin of that country’s politicians, especially its conservative lawmakers.)
There was also a deep-seated suspicion that if the West gains from this relationship, Russia must be losing something. As George W. Bush remarked recently, for Mr. Putin politics is a zero-sum game. A very tangible something appeared to be the loss of control over the “near abroad”, especially former Soviet member states. The state of the Baltic countries may be a fait accompli, but a line has to be drawn somewhere… and it appears it has, and it now includes Ukraine.
After all, Mr. Putin declared more than once in the past that he viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest political disaster of the 20th century. If you are the strongman of a nuclear superpower and thus have the means to do something about it, what would you do about the greatest political disaster? Try to undo it, no?
So in the second decade of the 21st century, Mr. Putin embarked on a decidedly 19th century style pursuit, as he is trying to bend Ukraine to his will. It’s not an open war just yet (Russia claims it’s not involved; if freedom-loving Russian soldiers spend their leave in Ukraine, that’s nobody’s business) but it’s getting close, especially as the West ponders providing arms to the government in Kyiv.
And very rapidly, we find ourselves in a geopolitical situation that is just as scary, if not scarier, than the worst moments of the Cold War. Mr. Putin enjoys tremendous support at home thanks to his nationalistic agenda, which sadly resonates all too well in those parts of the world. Abroad, he reminded us that he commands the strike capability of a nuclear superpower, so it is a very bad idea to mess with him. And the nationalist beast is a hungry one, which requires constant feeding. What next, after Ukraine? Another attempt at a “hybrid war” (of destabilization, irregular troops), this time in NATO’s Baltic member states? What if this provokes a decisive NATO response, in accordance with the NATO charter? Mushroom clouds over battlefields, followed by mushroom clouds over cities?
Last year, we commemorated the 100th anniversary of the start of the War to End All Wars. Maybe we (along with Mr. Putin and his supporters) ought to be reminded that the next world war will likely be the war to end all wars, albeit for the wrong reasons: it will end all wars not because we lose the appetite for bloodshed, but because nobody is left alive to fight.
Or worse yet, maybe this war will be won by our machines.
Anyone with a time machine, please let me know if my wife, our cats and I can get a free ride back to the 1960s…
Notice to Web advertisers: If you stick a video on a Web page that starts with blaring noise in the middle of the night, the only thing you accomplish is that I close the bleeping page in a mad panic, and I make sure never to visit it again.
Canadian liberals, rejoice: The network often dubbed “Fox News North” is no more. Reportedly, Sun News Network 
As the fighting in Ukraine intensifies, we often hear Russia’s complaint: that the West, gloating over its “victory” at the end of the Cold War, is encircling Russia and is imposing its will upon the country.