Spinor Info

Radio Free Europe about Hungary

Oct 312014

The once famous Hungarian language broadcasts of Radio Free Europe ceased more than two decades ago, shortly after the end of communism in my country of birth.

Now, however, Radio Free Europe joined the growing choir of voices concerned about the policies of Hungary’s current government, and the country’s slide away from the values of Western-style liberal democracy.

This article, which will no doubt be dismissed by supporters of the ruling FIDESZ party as misguided and uninformed, misled by “liberal propaganda”, provides a nice summary of the events that unfolded in the country in recent years. It is also accompanied by a video report, which details the rising popularity of the ultra-right in Hungary and the dangers that it represents.

I just feel compelled to repeat the famous quotation by the Spanish-American poet, writer and philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

A glimpse of the Sun

Space No Responses »

Oct 302014

Spacecraft sometimes catch a glimpse of the Sun as it reflects off a sea or an ocean. Here is an example:

Except that this example was not captured by Earth-orbiting spacecraft. The sea here is not a terrestrial ocean. It is a hydrocarbon sea of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Just to clarify, the reflection of the Sun is in the upper left of the image, where the outline of the sea is also clearly visible. The redder, arrow-shaped object closer to the center is a cloud formation.

Walking under an autumn sky

Canada, Local Ottawa, Personal No Responses »

Oct 302014

The parkways of the Gatineau Park are now closed and the autumn colors are nearly gone. Still, my wife and I enjoyed a pleasant walk today in the outskirts of the park, after a fine lunch at Le Buffet des Continents.

Autumn remains my favorite season. My only complaint is that it ends too soon, and it is often followed by a nasty winter.

Playing tourist at home

Canada, Local Ottawa, Personal No Responses »

Oct 292014

This afternoon, I felt compelled to take a walk to downtown Ottawa. Our home is within walking distance of Parliament Hill and the National War Memorial, where a deranged shooter killed a ceremonial guard, Corporal Nathan Cirillo.

It was a beautiful autumn day and the walk was very enjoyable. On my way downtown, I dropped by my favorite computer store (Canada Computers, on Rideau Street) to purchase some needed cables. Then I continued.

There was quite a crowd at the War Memorial, and it was full of flowers. Flowers, flowers and more flowers. Also, many Canadian flags.

And it so happened that I was very lucky: I caught the changing of the guard ceremony. I even managed to record it on video.

Near the end of the clip, a police officer (armed with what appeared to be a fully automatic weapon) crosses in front of my phone camera. He apologized for doing so (I can be heard muttering, “no problem,” on the video). After I was done recording, I stepped over to the policeman and had a brief conversation with him. I mentioned to him that it is an unfortunate necessity that he has to be part of the picture. He understood immediately what I meant. I also thanked him for his service.

I then carried on, right up to Parliament Hill. As a free citizen of a free country, I entered the grounds without encountering any guards, obstacles, metal detectors or other obscenities. It occurred to me that this is the first time I walked on Parliament Hill in 41 years.

The flag on top of the Peace Tower is still at half mast.

I also managed to take a panoramic photo of sorts of the view from the Hill:

Ottawa is still a beautiful city. And, having just returned from the Middle East, it was good to reassure myself that it remains a free city of a free people.

Goodbye, Arabia

Aviation, Personal, Politics No Responses »

Oct 282014

On my way back from sunny Abu Dhabi to autumn Ottawa. My wife asked me to bring some warm weather. I’ll try…

When you fly over trouble spots, the flight path can get interesting.

Our flight carefully avoided Iraqi, Syrian and Ukrainian airspace. We also spent as little time in Iranian skies as possible.

Soon, we’ll be flying over Hungary. Maybe I should try to wave to my Mom, in case she sees me…

Gunman on the streets

Canada, Local Ottawa, Politics No Responses »

Oct 222014

So here I am, late at night, sitting in an Abu Dhabi hotel room, watching local TV streaming from my workstation in Ottawa with the news of a shooting taking place just over a kilometer away from my home.

The shooter is dead. Hopefully, he was the only one. Let him rot.

Mathematical fiction

Books, Mathematics No Responses »

Oct 132014

Science fiction has a subgenre: mathematical fiction. Stories of this nature are rare; good stories are even rarer. One memorable story that I recall from ages ago was A Subway Named Moebius, written by A. J. Deutsch in 1950. There was another story more recently: Luminous by Greg Egan, which I read in Asimov’s SF magazine shortly before I stopped reading (and eventually, stopped subscribing to) said magazine. (Nothing wrong with the magazine; it’s just that I found many of the stories unsatisfying, and I found I had less and less time to read them. The genre is just not the same as it was back in the Golden Age of Science Fiction.)

So recently, I found out that Egan wrote a sequel: Dark Integers, published in the same magazine in 2007. I now had a chance to read it and I was not disappointed.

Both stories are very good. Both stories are based on the notion that as yet unproven mathematical theorems can go either way; that the Platonic book of all math has not only not yet been written, but that there is no unique book, and multiple versions of mathematics may coexist, with an uneasy boundary.

Now imagine that you perform innocent mathematical experiments on your computer, using, say, computer algebra to probe ever more exotic theorems in a subfield few non-mathematicians ever heard about. And imagine how you would feel if you realized that by doing so, you are undermining the very foundations of another universe’s existence, literally threatening to wipe them out.

OK, if you start poking holes in that idea, there are many, but the basic notion is not completely stupid, and the questions that the stories raise are worth contemplating. And Egan writes well… the stories are fun, too!

Incidentally, this was the first decent (published) science fiction story I ever came across that contained a few lines of C++ code.

Breaking news in the newspaper

Canada, Media No Responses »

Oct 132014

Something happened to me this morning that I have not experienced in ages. Probably not in the 21st century.

I learned about a breaking news event from a newspaper.

That is to say, this morning after I woke up, I happened to glance at the cover of The Globe and Mail before checking the state of the world on any electronic device. And the cover informed me about a massive fire and power outage in downtown Calgary.

I like The Globe and Mail. It is a fine newspaper, and sometimes, it informes me about things that I would not otherwise come across. And there is something to be said about reading a physical newspaper; I am certainly reading it differently, perhaps a tad more attentively, than I read online news sources.

But I long became accustomed to the idea that whatever is in the newspaper will be old news. Stuff I already know about, saw reports about on CNN or the CBC, read about on Google News.

This is why this moment this morning was so striking: like our forefathers in the past century, I learned about a breaking news story from an old-fashioned, paper newspaper.

Bomb Ebola?

Canada, Health, Politics No Responses »

Oct 042014

Whipping out CF-18s to drop bombs on the murderous creeps of ISIS is one thing… but are we also going to bomb the Ebola virus?

Dear CRTC: Hands off the Internet please

Canada, Internet, Television No Responses »

Sep 232014

Dear CRTC: Please stop trying to protect us poor Canadians from evil companies like Netflix.

Video-on-demand is not broadcasting. The Internet is not the public airwaves. You have no business trying to bully companies just because they threaten the livelihood of lumbering, decrepit behemoths like Rogers.

I am a Rogers Cable subscriber. I have been a Rogers Cable subscriber ever since they purchased Ottawa Cablevision more than two decades ago.

What am I getting from Rogers? Here are a few examples:

Inept, sometimes openly contemptuous customer service (like, what kind of a backward moron am I for still wanting to use analog cable without a settop box?);
Technically substandard service (programs interrupted by local commercials that are inserted at the wrong time, substandard signal quality on some analog channels; an analog video frame that is reduced in size by a ratio of 59/60 for no apparent reason);
Overpriced, obsolete hardware and no opportunity to use non-Rogers equipment, e.g., with a subscriber identity card;
Unnecessary encryption on all digital channels (including local channels), which makes it impossible to use a TV without a settop box.

And you wonder why I am contemplating “cutting the cord”?

Instead of blaming Netflix, perhaps you can have a conversation with Rogers about addressing issues that alienate their customers. If you are not willing to do that, fine, then let the free market do its thing. But take your dirty regulatory paws off the Canadian Internet, please.

Thank you, Scotland!

History, Politics No Responses »

Sep 192014

Keep-calm-and-carry-on-scan Sanity prevailed in Scotland last night.

By a comfortable margin, residents of Scotland rejected (ethnic) nationalism. Whatever their thoughts are about the current government in Westminster, it seems they decided that punishing David Cameron with a “Yes” vote would have amounted to biting off the nose to spite the face.

I always found nationalism distasteful. I don’t care if it is the nationalism of the oppressor or the oppressed. To be sure, it is easy the sympathize with the oppressed. But the solution to nationalist oppression is not to encourage the nationalism of the oppressed (so that they can then go and do some oppressing of their own, like, for instance, Hungarians did with their own minorities during the 1848-49 revolution against Austria). The solution is to put an end to the ideology that led to oppression in the first place. Governments should be responsible for governing the people in the territory that they control, regardless of ethnicity. And fragmenting the world into more, tinier countries in the 21st century just makes no practical sense.

To their credit, the Scots held a referendum with a clear, unambiguous question. “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” No shenanigans about sovereignty-association or a new economic-political partnership. And they seemed entirely civil about it.

Thank you, Scotland, for being wise. For not creating a precedent for the Balkanization of continental Europe.

Now… please don’t do this again, not in my lifetime anyway :-)

Why didn’t I go to Calgary?

Canada, Personal, Weather and Climate No Responses »

Sep 102014

I arrived in Ottawa in mid-July, 1987 as a landed immigrant. I was sponsored by my aunt and her husband András. It was András who awaited me at the airport on the evening of my arrival. (No, I did not arrive by air. My connecting flight from Montreal was canceled, so Air Canada put me in a limo along with another passenger. As the limo driver was not from Ottawa, and I knew nothing about the layout of the city, he dropped me off at the airport instead of taking me directly to my aunt’s house.)

I spent some time in the old (since decommissioned) airport building waiting for András to arrive. (In the pre-cellphone days, I first had to exchange some currency, then get some change, then find a payphone in order to be able to notify them about my whereabouts.) After a wait of a half hour or so, András did arrive. We only ever met once before, briefly, when they were visiting Hungary and I spent a few hours at my parents’ home, on leave from my mandatory military service. So when András saw me, he was not sure if I was the right person… as he approached me, he asked, “So you are Viktor?”

“Yes,” I answered, to which András replied with a second question: “Why did you come here, why didn’t you go to Calgary instead?”

Yes, András had a weird sense of humor. Not everyone appreciated it, but I did. I really grew to like him.

Earlier this week, it was Nature’s turn to be funny, while also providing me with a perfectly good answer to András’s question from 27 years ago. This is why, András:

Yes, András, I am a wimp. I can tolerate winter, but I really don’t like late summer snow storms.

Alas, András is no longer among us to hear my response. He passed away many years ago, after losing his battle with pancreatic cancer.

No French ships for Russia? (for now)

Canada, Politics 4 Responses »

Sep 042014

It appears that France decided to suspend delivery of the first of two Mistral-class helicopter assault ships that they have been building for Russia.

It will cost the French an awful lot of money. Still, this is the right thing to do. The last thing the West should provide to Putin’s Russia is more firepower. On the other hand, NATO should probably consider stepping in and purchasing these ships from France. Come to think of it, Canada could use the capability to effectively patrol its oceans (which is currently, for all practical intents and purposes, is outsourced to the United States).

Feynman’s lectures online

Physics No Responses »

Sep 042014

Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics remains a classic to this day.

Its newest edition has recently (I don’t know exactly when, I only came across it a few days ago) been made available in its entirety online, for free. It is a beautifully crafted, very high quality online edition, using LaTeX (MathJax) for equations, redrawn scalable figures.

Perhaps some day, someone will do the same to Landau’s and Lifshitz’s 10-volume Theoretical Physics series, too?

Open aggression

Politics No Responses »

Aug 282014

There is no other way of describing it: Russia now engages in open aggression against Ukraine. Whatever one’s thoughts are about Ukrainian nationalism or the wisdom of breaking up the territory of the old Russian empire into semi-viable successor states, such open aggression should be condemned without reservation. Russia being a nuclear superpower, Puting can do whatever the hell he wants, but that doesn’t mean that we should stay silent.

Curiously, the NATO Web site where these pictures were published is intermittently unavailable. Given this morning’s breaking news about coordinated cyberattacks originating from Russia and aimed at US banks, I would not be surprised if NATO’s Web site itself were itself subjected to something like a DoS attack by Russia, which might explain the intermittent outages.

Geography of the “near abroad”

Politics 1 Response »

Aug 272014

Our Russian friends apparently lack accurate maps, as they accidentally cross the border into Ukraine every so often. No harm intended, I am sure. Just to make sure it does not happen again, here is a helpful map, courtesy of Canada’s NATO delegation, tweeted by them (and retweeted by thousands of others) earlier today:

Another friend gone

Personal No Responses »

Aug 192014

I received an e-mail today that reminded me of an old friend, Gabor Laufer, and his misadventures in his capacity as a medical doctor with the American system of medical insurance.

Gabor was our neighbor when I was a little boy, living next door to our apartment in Budapest, along with his mother. At that time, he was a medical student. He in fact removed one of my baby teeth when I was 7 or 8 or so, and then gave me the pair of dentist’s pliers that he used as a memento.

Not long thereafter, Gabor left Hungary, and eventually landed in the United States, where he began to practice as an obstetrician-gynecologist in the Washington, D.C. area. It was here that he had a disagreement with his insurance company, who opted to settle in a case that involved Gabor, despite Gabor’s objections. Gabor found it fundamentally unacceptable that the insurance company would pay a patient even though he made no medical errors. Unfortunately, his quixotic fight achieved only one thing: the insurance company dropped him, and other insurers were not willing to deal with him either. This made it very difficult for Gabor to continue his practice. This is how he ended up somewhere in Kentucky or Iowa I believe, where he was able to work again at a family clinic.

Gabor was immensely intelligent, and proud of it. In the early 1980s, he authored a computer game, the name of which says it all: Intellectual Decathlon. I had a few interesting discussions with Gabor, although, I admit, sometimes these were a little frustrating, as he had a tendency to conclude that if something was beyond his ability to understand, it could not possibly be right. (Explaining relativistic cosmology to someone who is not familiar with the math is a difficult task.)

I stayed in touch with Gabor intermittently over the years. In the late 1980s, after I moved to Canada, I was a frequent visitor to his computer BBS (long-distance dial-up to the Washington D.C. area at 2400 bps) called Elite Few. But then, the Internet led to the demise of most, if not all, dial-up BBSs, and the Elite Few BBS was no exception.

I once again got in touch with Gabor in the late 2000’s, and we exchanged several e-mails. We also became Facebook friends. The last e-mail I received from him, in 2011, was about an impending change of his e-mail address. I have not heard from him since, and his Facebook page also fell silent.

But now, as I Googled his name, I came across something else: an obituary of sorts, from one of his doctor friends. This is how I found out that Gabor was no longer among us. Perhaps I should not be surprised. Though he was far from old (only 65 when he passed away), he was a chain smoker. Still… it is really sad to learn, more than two years after his death, that he is no more. Gabor’s death was also commemorated on a news discussion site.

As I was going through old e-mails, I came across something else: Gabor’s photo albums on Flickr. It was here that I was able to locate a relatively recent picture of Gabor, made in 2009 I believe, when he was visiting Budapest.

Good-bye, Gabor. It was an honor, knowing you. May you rest in peace.

Xenophobia then and now…

History, Politics No Responses »

Aug 152014

The other day, I was watching The Tramp and the Dictator, a documentary about Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator, in which I came across this gem:

The speaker is Rep. Martin Dies from Texas, who later became known as the founder of the infamous House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities (initially nicknamed the Dies committee). A month earlier, Mr. Dies also presented his views to a radio audience.

Unfortunately, the words uttered by some anti-immigration politicians and activists today in the United States are little different from the words uttered nearly 80 years ago by Mr. Dies.

Mailing lists and digests

Internet No Responses »

Aug 142014

Electronic mailing lists are a somewhat old-fashioned way to let a group of people stay in touch and communicate about a topic of interest.

Many mailing lists these days offer a “digest” service: instead of sending out each message individually to the list recipient, they receive one message a day, a week, or some other set interval, containing all the traffic from the mailing list during that time period.

Tonight, on a mailing list to which I subscribe, I saw yet another request to delete the original message from any replies, for the benefit of digest readers. I have seen such requests many times in the past, and every time I come across one, I get rather annoyed.

Including the original message is of course redundant for “digest” readers, as they probably have a copy of the original message right there, as part of the same digest. But for non-digest readers, including the original saves the time it takes to look up the earlier message.

In other words, what these helpful volunteer “list police” folks are really saying amounts to this: If you are one of those idiots who actually bothers to read messages individually, your time is less valuable than the time of those who already decided that the list is not worth that much attention in the first place.

Why, thank you for putting me in my place.

Einstein’s field equations… in a Subway sandwich commercial?

Physics, Television No Responses »

Aug 132014

Last night, as I was watching the latest episode of Tyrant (itself an excellent show about a fictitious Middle Eastern dictatorship and its ruling family), I happened to glance at the TV during a commercial break just at the right split second to see this:

This was part of an ad, a Subway sandwich commercial, with an animated monkey handing this exam sheet back to a student (also a monkey). What caught my eye was the equation on this sheet. What??? Einstein’s field equations?

Yup, that’s exactly what I saw there, the equation \(G_{\alpha\beta}=\dfrac{8\pi G}{c^4}T_{\alpha\beta}\). General relativity.

Other, easily recognizable equations on the sheet included an equation of the electrostatic Coulomb force, the definition of the quantum mechanical probability amplitude, and the continuity equation.

What struck me was that all these are legitimate equations from physics, not gibberish. And all that in a silly Subway commercial. Wow.

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