Nov 072013
 

Here is a new statistic.

In the first seven months of 2013, there were 25 reports of verbal or physical insults against Muslims on the streets of Quebec’s cities.

Then, the Parti Quebecois government introduced the notion of its “value charter”, aimed at banning the wear of religious clothing and overtly religious symbols by people employed in the public service.

In the past month, there were 117 instances of verbal or physical abuse reported by Muslims (in the overwhelming majority of cases, by Muslim women) who were insulted on Quebec streets.

In other words, Quebec nationalists, under the guise of protecting women’s rights, created a problem where none existed, and pitted communities against each other.

I am sick to the stomach by nationalism be it Hungarians, Jews, Russians, Chinese, or for that matter, Quebecois.

 Posted by at 11:55 am
Nov 012013
 

The other day, I bought a fine jar of “No Name” brand Polish pickles at Loblaws. They were great pickles. Nothing wrong with the quality or the taste.

However, there was something my wife noticed on the label that was, shall we say, surprising.

Can’t see it? Here are the relevant bits, enlarged:

Still, I may stick to the same brand. Not only are the pickles really tasty, but Canada, after all, does export plenty of food to India, including lentils. So it’s only fair for us to eat some Indian-made Polish pickles in return. Especially since they really are yummy.

 Posted by at 6:59 pm
Oct 312013
 

I just spent a small
Fortune at the vet,
And all I got to bring home
Is this lousy cat.

Our cat Szürke’s packed cell volume (PCV) is up this morning. A ray of hope. Dare we hope? Or is it just that roller coaster thing again, and his PCV might come crashing down over the weekend, as it did before? If that happens, we’re really out of options.

 Posted by at 12:20 pm
Oct 302013
 

My wife took the #7 bus yesterday on her way home from the Byward Market.

The bus had to take a detour, due to the ongoing construction on Rideau street.

Then it had to take a further detour, perhaps due to the construction, maybe some other reason (an accident?)

When I spoke to her, the bus was standing still on Chapel street, heading in the wrong direction.

Some 20 minutes later, when the bus was already on Laurier, I turned on continuous GPS tracking of her phone. Tracking information was collected roughly every minute.

All in all, it took her approximately 45 minutes to get home from the intersection of Chapel and Wilbrod streets.

According to Google Maps, the distance is 950 meters on foot, and it would have take 12 minutes to get home walking. Unfortunately, she had some heavy bags with her so walking was not really an option. Although, had she known what was about to happen, she could have gotten off the bus at Besserer and Chapel, only a 700 meter walk from home.

Construction season is so much fun.

 Posted by at 11:20 am
Oct 232013
 

Our second oldest cat, Szürke (his name means gray in Hungarian, as he is a gray tabby; but we often just call him Süsü, which means something like silly, because he’s a silly little lapcat), is gravely ill. (As is my bank account as a result of the veterinary expenses, but that is another story.)

Trouble is, we don’t know what’s wrong with him.

He has hyperthyroidism, that much we know; he has been getting medication for that for a couple of years already.

But most recently, he became severely anemic. The doctors at first suspected renal failure. But that does not seem to be the case. The problem is more acute, perhaps some gastrointestinal bleeding. Yet still, there is no obvious cause, hence no obvious treatment.

His red cell count keeps dropping. We visited him tonight in the veterinary hospital. We are prepared for the possibility that this was good-bye.

But we have not yet given up hope.

 Posted by at 12:21 am
Oct 112013
 

OPCW_logoFour years ago, the Nobel peace prize was awarded to Barack Obama, despite the fact that he was still at the beginning of his presidency and it was not at all clear yet what his legacy would be with respect to world peace. Some accused the Nobel committee of political activism.

Last year, the prize was awarded to the European Union. Many were appalled that a faceless organization received the prize, but at least arguably, this organization is indeed responsible for lasting peace among nations that were once bitter enemies and fought each other in two world wars.

But now, they awarded the prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Another faceless organization, whose efforts have yet to bear fruit in Syria.

I do not mean to belittle the efforts of the OPCW, but why did they not award the prize to an actual person, namely Malala Yousafzai? With her fight for girls’ education, and her exceptionally forgiving attitude towards those who tried to murder her, she is the embodiment of what fighting for a peaceful world really means: courage and grace, and wisdom well beyond her years.

I hope she’ll get another chance next year.

 Posted by at 10:09 pm
Oct 112013
 

Reader’s Digest recently conducted an interesting experiment: they “lost” 12 wallets, filled with about $50 worth of cash and sufficient documentation to locate the owner, in 16 cities around the world. The result: Finns in Helsinki are the most honest with 11 of the 12 wallets returned, whereas in Lisbon, Portugal, the sole wallet that was returned was, in fact, found by a visiting Dutch couple. Finns needless to say, are rejoicing: “we don’t even run red lights,” boasted a Helsinki resident.

So what can we conclude from this interesting experiment? Perhaps shockingly, almost nothing.

This becomes evident if I plot a histogram with the number of wallets returned, and overlay on it a binomial distribution for a probability of 46.875% (which corresponds to the total number of wallets returned, 90 out of 192), I get a curve that is matched very closely by the histogram. Unsurprisingly, there will be a certain probability that in a given city, 1, 2, 3, etc. wallets are returned; and the results of Reader’s Digest match this prediction closely.

So there is no reason for Finns to rejoice or for the Portuguese to feel shame. It’s all just blind luck, after all. And the only valid conclusion we can draw from this experiment is that people are just as likely to be decent folks in Lisbon as in Helsinki.

But how do you explain this to a lay audience? More importantly, how do you prevent a political demagogue from drawing false or unwarranted conclusions from the data?

 Posted by at 9:40 pm
Oct 112013
 

Is this a worthy do-it-yourself neuroscience experiment, or an example of a technology gone berserk, foreshadowing a bleak future?

A US company is planning to ship $99 kits this fall, allowing anyone to turn a cockroach into a remote controlled cyborg. Educational? Or more like the stuff of bad dreams?

For me, it’s the latter. Perhaps it doesn’t help that I am halfway through reading Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, sequel to Oryx and Crake, a dystopian science fiction novel set in a bleak future in which humanity destroys itself through the reckless use of biotech and related technologies.

A cockroach may not be a beloved animal. Its nervous system may be too small, too simple for it to feel real pain. Nonetheless, I feel there is something deeply disturbing and fundamentally unethical about the idea of turning a living animal into a remote control toy.

To put it more simply: it creeps the hell out of me.

 Posted by at 11:49 am
Oct 112013
 

Hungary once had a proud national airline, MALÉV. I once worked for MALÉV, at least indirectly, when I built software simulators to calculate take-off distances and later, CO2 emissions for MALÉV’s fleet of Tu-154 aircraft. Sadly, MALÉV is no more: in early 2012, after the European Union declared that MALÉV received illegal subsidies from the Hungarian government, the airline went bankrupt and was liquidated.

Earlier this year, we saw some encouraging news: a private group of investors were trying to create a new national airline, designed to compete at the high end of the market. Their initial announcements were received with hope by some, with skepticism by others. The airline hit some bureaucratic hurdles as it was trying to get its newly leased small fleet of used 737s off the ground; their inaugural flights were repeatedly postponed.

But now, we learn that a prospective investor from the Middle East withdraw from the project, and as a result, the airline is unable to pay the salaries of its 70-odd employees for the month of September. In other words, for all practical intents and purposes, it is bankrupt. And this is probably a world first: a national airline that goes bankrupt without ever getting a single scheduled flight off the tarmac.

 Posted by at 11:37 am
Oct 112013
 

I just finished reading a fascinating book: Command and Control, by Erich Schlosser.

The subtitle may be somewhat more revealing: “Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety”.

It is a book about the safety (or lack thereof) of America’s nuclear weapons. And it was an eye-opening read.

Yes, I knew that there were some incidents in the past during which nuclear weapons were lost, damaged, or destroyed. Yes, I knew that there were incidents of false alarm, when early warning systems in the United States or the Soviet Union indicated an attack even though no such attack was under way.

But like many, I assumed that the weapons themselves were designed to be inherently safe. That by design, the weapons were secure against accidental detonation (even during a serious accident such as the crash of a bomber aircraft) or unauthorized use.

What I did not expect to read about were weapons that could be detonated by a stray electrical signal. A military leadership that resisted anything that could stand in the way of successful deployment of a weapon, including the installation of coded devices (“permissive action links”.) Or even when such coded devices were ultimately installed, in effect sabotaging them by using the code “00000000” everywhere. What I did not expect to read about were accidents involving nuclear weapons where only a single switch, prone to failure, stood between the world and an accidental thermonuclear explosion.

The book uses a specific incident, the in-silo explosion of a Titan II missile in 1980, as a framework to tell its story. I was shocked by the events leading up to the accident as well as the chaotic, panicky reaction afterwards (including pathetic attempts to hide systemic errors by trying to blame low-ranking airmen for the accident).

The book is mostly about America’s weapon systems, but it is not meant to imply that foolish attitudes towards the deadliest weapon ever invented by humanity are uniquely American. A famous line in the movie classic, Dr. Strangelove, is when Dr. Strangelove yells at the Soviet ambassador in frustration, “Yes, but the… whole point of the doomsday machine… is lost… if you keep it a secret!” In the 1980s, the Soviet Union finished construction of the Perimeter system, an automated system designed to respond with a massive nuclear strike automatically in case the Soviet leadership was incapacitated and the system detected nuclear explosions on Soviet soil. In other words: a doomsday machine. The system is believed to remain operational to this date.

And they kept it a secret.

 Posted by at 11:01 am
Oct 052013
 

Here is an interesting theory: that the shutdown of the US government was, at least in part, caused by remarks made by Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

To be sure, Harper and his Foreign Minister, John Baird, said a lot of weird things recently, on Iran and other topics, earning Canada the distinction of being labeled a “right-wing gas bag” by The Huffington Post.

But it was Harper’s “we don’t take no for an answer” comment concerning the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that prompted Tom Steyer, a liberal-leaning San Francisco billionaire, to suggest that it may have played a part in the US government shutdown. The pipeline, after all, was one of the items on the original Tea Party laundry list of conditions for approving a continuing resolution.

 Posted by at 11:53 am
Oct 052013
 

One of my favorite programs on CNN is Reliable Sources, the channel’s press/media backgrounder. It used to be hosted by Washington journalist Howard Kurtz, who recently moved to Fox News, however, to host a similar program (Mediabuzz) there.

Since then, CNN has been using invited guest hosts to host the program. One of those guest hosts, Brian Stelter, appeared for the second time this past Sunday.

Near the end of his program, he delivered a scathing (well-deserved, but scathing) criticism of CNN itself, about the way the channel bent disclosure rules to accommodate hosts and guests on the new program Crossfire.

I wonder if they will invite him back. (Or maybe he doesn’t want to be invited back?)

 Posted by at 11:34 am
Sep 292013
 

Last week, U.S. Republican senator Ted Cruz was featured on television screens numerous times, on account of his rather pointless marathon 21-hour filibuster trying to derail Obamacare.

Whenever I saw his face on screen, I was taken aback by one thing: Just how eerily similar he looks to another senator from the inglorious past, senator Joseph McCarthy.

Apparently, the similarity is more than skin deep. I just happened upon a February article published in Forbes Magazine, which compares the actions of senator Cruz to the dirty politics of his infamous predecessor.

 Posted by at 9:30 am
Sep 272013
 

It is now formally official: global surface temperatures did not increase significantly in the past 15 years or so.

But if skeptics conclude that this is it, the smoking gun that proves that all climate science is hogwash, they better think again. When we look closely, the plots reveal something a lot more interesting.

For starters… this is not the first time global temperatures stagnated or even decreased somewhat since the start of recordkeeping. There is a roughly 20-year period centered around 1950 or so, and another, even longer period centered roughly around 1890. This looks in fact like evidence that there may be something to the idea of a 60-year climate cycle. However, the alarming bit is this: every time the cycle peaks, temperatures are higher than in the previous cycle.

The just released IPCC Summary for Policymakers makes no mention of this cycle but it does offer an explanation for the observed stagnating temperatures. These are probably a result of volcanic activity, they tell us, the solar cycle, and perhaps mismodeling the effects of greenhouse gases and aerosols, but they are not exactly sure.

And certainty is characterized with words like “high confidence,” “medium confidence” and such, with no definitions given. These will be supplied, supposedly, in the technical report that will be released on Monday. Nonetheless, the statement that “Probabilistic estimates […] are based on statistical analysis of observations or model results, or both, and expert judgment” [emphasis mine] does not fill me with confidence, if you will pardon the pun.

In fact, I feel compelled to compare this to the various reports and releases issued by the LHC in recent years about the Higgs boson. There was no “expert judgment”. There were objective statistical analysis methods and procedures that were thoroughly documented (even though they were often difficult to comprehend, due to their sheer complexity.) There were objective standards for claiming a discovery.

Given the extreme political sensitivity of the topic, I think the IPCC should adopt similar or even more stringent standards of analysis as the LHC. Do away with “expert judgment” and use instead proper statistical tools to establish the likelihood of specific climate models in the light of the gathered data. And if the models do not work, e.g., if they failed to predict stagnating temperatures, the right thing to do is say that this is so; there is no need for “expert judgment”. Just state the facts.

 Posted by at 10:45 pm
Sep 272013
 

I’ve been hesitant to write about this, as skeptics will already have plenty to gripe about, I don’t need to pile on. And I swear I am not looking for excuses to bash the IPCC, not to mention that I have little sympathy or patience for skeptics who believe that an entire body of science is just one huge scam to make Al Gore and his buddies rich.

But… I was very disappointed to see plots in the latest IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” report that appear unnecessarily manipulative.

Wikipedia describes these as truncated or “gee-whiz” graphs: graphs in which the vertical axis does not start at zero. This can dramatically change the appearance of a plot, making small variations appear much larger than they really are.

To be clear, the use of truncated plots is often legitimate. Perhaps the plot compares two quantities that are of a similar magnitude. Perhaps the plot shows a quantity the absolute magnitude of which is irrelevant. Perhaps the quantity is such that “0” has no special meaning or it is not a natural start of the range (e.g., pH, temperature in Centigrade).

But in other cases, this practice can be viewed as misleading, intellectually dishonest (for instance, it is common for financial companies to manipulate plots this way to make their market performance appear more impressive than it really is) or outright fraudulent.

So here we are, the 2013 IPCC report’s summary for policymakers has been released in draft form, and what do I see in it? Several key plots that have been presented in truncated “gee-whiz” form, despite the fact that the quantities they represent are such that their absolute magnitudes are relevant, that their variability must be measured against their absolute magnitudes, and where zero is a natural start of the range.

I am presenting the original plots on the left and my crudely “untruncated” versions on the right:

This is not kosher, especially in a document that is intended for consumption by a lay audience who may not have the scientific education to spot such subtleties.

The document is still labeled a draft, with copy editing in particular yet to take place. Here’s to hoping that these plots (and any similar plots that may appear in the main report) are corrected before publication, to avoid the impression of trying to exaggerate the case for climate change. Scientists should be presenting the science objectively and leave the manipulation, even inadvertent manipulation, to politicians.

 Posted by at 10:22 pm
Sep 202013
 

Last week, it was all over the news: Voyager 1 has left the solar system.

Except that it really didn’t. Voyager 1’s trajectory is, and will continue to be, dominated by the Sun’s gravity for thousands of years. Voyager 1 is significantly closer to the Sun than Sedna (one of the icy dwarfs in the outer solar system) at aphelion. And then there is the hypothesized Oort cloud, a spherical cloud of planetesimals roughly a light year from the Sun. Voyager 1 will take thousands of years to travel that distance.

Of course, Voyager 1 is way outside the orbit of the outermost planet, Neptune. But that happened decades ago, back in the 1980s. By 1990, Voyager 1 was far enough from the Sun to be able to take its famous “family portrait”, a mosaic that covered six of the eight planets (Mars was too faint, while Mercury was too close to the Sun.)

So what exactly happened this month? Well, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause, the boundary where the solar wind collides with the interstellar medium. It is also the location where magnetic fields are no longer dominated by the Sun.

So in this sense, Voyager 1 has indeed crossed into the interstellar medium. The particles its instruments sample are the particles found in interstellar space, not particles emitted by the Sun.

So it is a significant milestone, but it is somewhat misleading to suggest that “Voyager 1 has left the solar system”, which we heard so many times in the past several days.

 Posted by at 4:40 pm
Sep 202013
 

Grote_Antenna_WheatonThe world’s first parabolic radio telescope was, astonishingly, built in someone’s back yard.

I am reading about the radio telescope of American amateur radio enthusiast and amateur astronomer Grote Reber.

In 1937, Reber built a 9-meter parabolic reflector in his family’s back yard.

Reber was the first to make a systematic survey of the radio sky, not only confirming Jansky’s earlier, pioneering discovery of radio waves from the Milky Way but also discovering radio sources such as Cygnus X-1 and Cassiopeia A.

grote5

For nearly a decade, Reber was the only person in the world doing radio astronomy.

Reber had a long life. He spent his final years in Tasmania, one of the few places on Earth where occasionally, very low frequency radio waves penetrate the ionosphere and are detectable by a ground-based antenna.

 Posted by at 2:55 pm
Sep 172013
 

It has been known for some time: In the past decade, perhaps decade and a half, there was no significant global warming.

There are many explanations proposed for this slowdown/pause, and the actual cause is likely a combination of these: ocean surface cooling, natural climate oscillations, an unusual solar minimum, water vapor, aerosols, you name it.

Here is one problem with these explanations: These are the same ideas that were proposed, as alternatives to anthropogenic CO2, as causes behind the observed warming, by climate change “skeptics”, only to be summarily dismissed by many in the climate change community as denialist crackpottery.

Sadly, this may very well mean that climate skeptics will claim victory, and those inclined to listen to them will conclude that all this global warming hogwash was just some scam dreamed up by Al Gore and his cronies. Meanwhile, we tend to forget about other things that elevated atmospheric CO2 levels do, such as ocean acidification; not to mention other, equally threatening global environmental concerns, for instance species extinction occurring on a scale not seen since the day of the dinosaurs.

 Posted by at 7:43 pm
Sep 172013
 

This has been making the rounds on the Internets in the past few days: a modular mobile phone concept, with swappable parts.

Except that (with apologies to its inventor and supporters) I don’t think it will ever work. And no, not because conspiring corporations will torpedo it. (For what it’s worth, I am a free agent: I am not on the payroll of any conspiring corporations.)

The first reason is mechanical. For the phone to be robust, the backboard would have to be really strong and bulky. The connectors would have to be rock solid. Yes, it can be done, but only by using expensive materials, and the backboard itself will be half as thick already as a modern phone like a Samsung Galaxy.

The second reason is power and signaling. The placement of components on a modern phone mainboard is not accidental. Signal paths matter when things run off a multigigahertz clock. Power matters when some components can momentarily draw significant current. The placement of antennas matters, to maximize efficiency and minimize interference from the phone’s own components.

Third, the design will inevitably prove too constraining. Take modern PCs as an analogy. Yes, they are modular (it is much easier, of course, to make a desktop PC modular.) But only to a point. Try shoving an old ISA extension card into a modern PC. Even if it were perfectly functional (e.g., an old modem, serial/parallel or low-speed communication card that never needed more than ISA speeds) you can’t use it anymore, as no modern motherboard supports ISA slots. Many modern motherboards don’t even support PCI slots. Processor sockets change. Memory module standards change. Even power supply standards changed a surprising number of times. (You’d think there are only so many ways to supply 12VDC, 5VDC, and maybe 3.3VDC, but you’d be wrong.)

Still, Phonebloks is a neat idea. In fact, it’s one of those ideas that may never work as intended, but may still inspire other useful inventions.

 Posted by at 7:27 pm
Sep 172013
 

Lest we forget, this is a really big deal not just for Bombardier but also for Canada: the successful first test flight of Bombardier’s new C-series jet.

This new jet puts Bombardier in direct competition with the two giants, Boeing and Airbus.

Not bad from a country of less than 34 million people.

 Posted by at 3:54 pm