Black anniversary

 History, Politics  No Responses »
Mar 182013
 

I was already blogging 10 years ago, perhaps blogging more than these days as before the advent of social media, almost no-one ever yelled back. Anyhow, we are now rapidly approaching the anniversary of the day I dubbed “black Thursday” in my blog (I actually changed the background color to black, causing me no small amount of grief when years later, I converted my static HTML blog by writing a simple homebrew blog engine and I had to write workaround code to process the custom formatting.)

Back then, I used to express my disappointment and disgust with the campaign of lies that led up to this war by presenting some relevant statistics in my blog. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to do it again:

War budget requested by President Bush, assuming hostilities end in 30 days $75,000,000,000.00
Actual cost of the Iraqi war to the US and allies according to the LA Times $1,700,000,000,000.00
Weapons of Mass Destruction found in Iraqi possession 0
Number of people killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks 2,996
Number of US troops killed in Iraq 4,409
Number of US troops wounded in Iraq 31,926
Number of Iraqi civilians killed, conservative estimate by Iraq Body Count ~120,000
Debt-to-GDP ratio of the United States (public debt) at Bush’s inauguration 56%
Debt-to-GDP ratio of the United States at the end of Bush’s term 84%

 

And the end result of this valiant effort? Iraq is now strongly under the influence of Iran, which became a major regional power that is no longer contained by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The credibility of the United States remains low. The United States economy is hindered by a recession that is combined with debt-to-GDP levels unprecedented since the end of WW2.

And it took another president, Barack Hussein Obama, to find and kill the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden… who, incidentally, was not in any way connected with Saddam Hussein’s regime.

 Posted by at 9:59 pm

Not so contrarian physics

 Physics  No Responses »
Mar 172013
 

In a post a few days ago, I expressed my skeptical views concerning the interpretation of some of the recent Higgs results from CERN. I used a simple analogy, an example in which measuring the average height of the inhabitants in a set of buildings is used to determine which of them may house the Harlem Globetrotters.

However, I came to realize (thanks in part to some helpful criticism that my post received) that I left out one possibility. What if the buildings are too small? Or the ‘Trotters are just too, hmm, tired after a long party and end up in the wrong building? In that case, a measurement may look like this:

If we have an a priori reason to believe that, for whatever reason, the players are indeed spread out across several buildings, then we can indeed not expect to see a sharp peak at #4 (or whichever building is assigned to the Globetrotters); instead, we should see a broad excess, just what the CMS experiment is seeing when it measured the decay of the presumed Higgs boson into a τ+τ− pair.

So is there an a priori reason for the data to be spread out like this? I believe there is. No instrument detects τ leptons directly, as their lifetime is too short. Instead, τ events are reconstructed from decay products, and all forms of τ decay involve at least one neutrino, which may carry away a significant portion of the lepton’s energy. So the final uncertainty in the total measured energy of the τ+τ− pair can be quite significant.

In other words, many of the Globetrotters may indeed be sleeping in the wrong building.

Nonetheless, as my copy of the venerable 20-year old book, The Higgs Hunter’s Guide suggests, the decay into τ leptons can be a valuable means of confirmation. Which is perhaps why it is troubling that for now, the other major detector at the LHC, ATLAS, failed to see a similar broad excess of τ+τ− events near the presumed Higgs mass.

 Posted by at 10:23 am

Google Reader, RIP

 Internet  No Responses »
Mar 152013
 

Yesterday, when I logged on to Google Reader, I was presented with a notice indicating that Reader will be shut down July 1st.

Too bad. I was not using Reader much, but it was the one semi-automated means with which I was reasonably comfortable that allowed me to share my blog posts on Google+. Whether or not I can be bothered to continue with Google+ afterwards remains to be seen. Maybe not… blogs are meant to be a write-only medium anyway (I yell at the world, I do not expect the world to yell back at me), a model which is kind of broken in this era of social networking.

Anyhow, it appears that a number of people are quite upset at Google’s decision, and they even started a petition that is rapidly approaching 100,000 signatures. (Yes, I signed it, too.) So who knows, maybe Google will listen and Reader will get a reprieve.

 Posted by at 9:03 am

Contrarian physics

 Physics  1 Response »
Mar 142013
 

I have been reading a lot today about the latest news from Europe, the supposed confirmation that the elementary particle observed at CERN may indeed by the Higgs boson.

And while they are probably right, I feel that the strong pronouncements may be a little premature and perhaps unwarranted.

Let me demonstrate my thoughts using a simple example and some pretty pictures.

Suppose you go to a camp site. At that camp site there are five buildings, each of the buildings housing a different team. One may be a literary club, another may be a club of chess enthusiasts… but you have reason to believe that one of the buildings is actually occupied by the Harlem Globetrotters.

Suppose that the only measurement available to you is a measurement of the average height of the people housed in each of the buildings. You of course know what the mean height and its standard deviation are for the entire population. So then, suppose you are presented with a graph that shows the average height, with error bars, of the people housed in each of five buildings:

The red dashed line is the population average; the green and yellow shaded areas correspond to one and two standard deviations; and the black dots are the actual data points, with standard deviations, representing the average height of the residents in each of the five buildings.

Can you confirm from this diagram that one of the buildings may indeed be housing the Harlem Globetrotters? Can you guess which one? Why, it’s #4. Easy, wasn’t it. It is the only building in which the average height of the residents deviates from the population (background) average significantly, whereas the heights of the residents of all the other buildings are consistent with the “null hypothesis”, namely that they are random people from the population background.

But suppose instead that the graph looks like this:

Can you still tell which building houses the Globetrotters? Guess not. It could be #2… or it could be #4. But if you have other reasons to believe that #4 houses the Globetrotters, you can certainly use this data set as a means of confirmation, even though you are left wondering why #2 also appears perhaps as an outlier. But then, outliers sometimes happen as mere statistical flukes.

But suppose instead that you see a plot like this one:

What can you conclude from this plot? Can you conclude anything? Is this a real measurement result and perhaps the entire camp site has been taken over by tall basketball players? Or perhaps you have a systematic error in your measurement, using the wrong ruler maybe? You simply cannot tell. More importantly, you absolutely cannot tell whether or not any of the buildings houses the Harlem Globetrotters, much less which one. Despite the fact that building #4 is still about four standard deviations away from the population average. Until you resolve the issue of the systematic, this data set cannot be used to conclude anything.

But then, why are we told that a similar-looking plot, this one indicating the rate of Higgs boson decay into a pair of τ particles (the heaviest cousin of the electron), indicates a “local significance of 2.9σ”? With a “best fit μ = 1.1 ± 0.4” for a 125 GeV Higgs boson?

It indicates no such thing. The only thing this plot actually indicates is the presence of an unexplained systematic bias.

Or am I being stubbornly stupid here?

 Posted by at 10:01 pm

And then there were two (Popes, that is)

 Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Mar 132013
 

There are two popes in Rome today: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis.

And it is historical: Pope Francis is the first pope from outside of Europe (okay, technically Saint Peter was also from outside of Europe, but it’s not quite the same thing). He seems like a kind, charismatic person who reportedly lives in a lowly apartment, cooking his own meals. He took the name of St. Francis, which may indicate a desire to reform the Church. The first few seconds of his appearance on the papal balcony were seconds of silence. Last but not least, he is a Jesuit, whatever that implies.

Anyhow, the old joke I learned back in grade school (“How do popes greet each other?” The answer, of course, is that they don’t, since there is only one pope) no longer applies. It is very likely that Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI will have many chances to say hello to each other.

 Posted by at 4:58 pm

50

 Personal  No Responses »
Mar 112013
 

Here are a few things I am not planning to do today:

  • I will not feel particularly sorry for myself.
  • I am not buying a red Porsche. (I always preferred muscle cars over European toys anyway.)
  • I am not going out to find an expensive girlfriend.
  • I will not run away from home with a girlfriend half my age.
  • I am not planning to have a heart attack (of course, one never knows.)
  • I will not to start hair replacement therapy (and not just because I don’t need to.)
  • I am not going to complain (too much) about my back hurting.

Last but not least: I am not going to grow up. According to an Internet meme I just came across, if you haven’t grown up by age 50, you don’t have to.

 Posted by at 9:11 am

Uptime

 Computers, Personal  No Responses »
Mar 102013
 

I am getting close to breaking some of my records here. My main server has now been up 70 days longer than the planned trip to Mars:

There really was no need to reboot, and there won’t be any unless a) there is a critical patch to this version of the Linux kernel, b) I decide to carry out a planned upgrade to Slackware 14.0, c) the system crashes, d) the hardware fails, or perhaps most likely: e) I decide to bring down the server in order to remove a few pounds of cat hair, dust bunnies and whatever else may have accumulated in its case over the course of 19 months.

 Posted by at 2:25 pm

Daylight savings nonsense

 Internet, Politics, Space  No Responses »
Mar 102013
 

To the esteemed dinosaurs in charge of whatever our timekeeping bureaucracies happen to be: stop this nonsense already. We no more need daylight savings time in 2013 than we need coal rationing.

It is an outdated idea, the benefits of which may have been dubious even at the time of its inception, and are almost certainly nonexistent today. But the harm is real: you are subjecting the entire population to a completely unnecessary one-hour jetlag each spring.

Being self-employed and working mostly from my home, I am among the least affected, but I still find this clock-forwarding business just boneheadedly stupid and annoying.

Oh, and while you are at it… would you please get rid of leap seconds, too? Another harmful solution to a nonexistent problem. So what if our clocks are out of whack by a second with respect to the Earth’s rotation? Does it bother anyone?

Oh wait. The organization in charge of leap seconds is the ITU. The same ITU that is busy trying to place the Internet under international regulation, at the bidding of such champions of Internet freedom like China or Russia. No wonder they have little time left in their busy schedule to abolish leap seconds.

 Posted by at 9:07 am

In memoriam

 Personal  3 Responses »
Mar 062013
 

Two days ago, I received the sad news: my good friend George Olah is no longer among us.

I actually have a recent picture of him, courtesy of CBC Ottawa: during a news report last year about smoking prevention, George appeared in a bit of stock footage, standing on a sidewalk somewhere in downtown Ottawa, smoking a cigarette.

Yes, George was a smoker, which may have had something to do with the sudden heart attack that took him from us. Or not. Sometimes, perfectly healthy people with no ill habits die for no reason at all.

George fled Hungary in 1956 after the failed anti-communist revolution and eventually came to Canada. Yet his opinions were never clouded or biased by his personal experiences: he had a sober view of the current political situation in Hungary, and shared many of the concerns my wife and I have regarding the country’s future.

I’ve known George for nearly 26 years. Back in 1987, when I came to Canada, it was George who introduced me at the company where I got my first consulting contract. Thanks to George, I never had to wash dishes or fry hamburgers; within a few weeks of my arrival, I was writing C code for an application at Forestry Canada. A few years later, when I was going through a difficult time, it was again George who got me in touch with a group that hired me for a programming job; the people I worked with there remain my friends to this day.

In recent years, George was busy with a number of interesting projects that involved low power wireless technology and ad-hoc networking. He had high hopes for his inventions. Indeed, he was a true optimist, always full of plans for the future. You couldn’t really tell that he was already past his 70th birthday.

George also liked to cook. Around Christmas, he often made cabbage rolls in quantities that would feed a small army. This past Christmas was no different; and not for the first time, he offered us some, which I duly picked up at his home. It was very tasty. Yum! We have not yet returned the container.

Well, I guess that was the last batch of cabbage rolls George ever cooked. And the aspic jelly, another one of George’s wintertime favorites that he was planning to prepare, won’t be made either.

What else can I say? Thank you, George, for the help, for the memories, for the food, for all the laughs and for all the fun. Szervusz, Gyuri.

 Posted by at 10:07 pm

Them’s fighting words

 Politics  No Responses »
Mar 032013
 

gatekeepersIsrael’s occupation of Palestinian territories continues. Nothing infuriates those who believe this occupation is necessary than words like these:

“We’ve become… cruel. The future is bleak. It’s dark, the future. Where does it lead? To a change in the people’s character […] it’s a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II.”

or these:

“[W]e win every battle, but we lose the war.”

or these:

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

You might be forgiven if you thought these quotes are from left-wing or Islamist radicals, but that is not the case. These are words uttered by former heads of Israel’s internal security service, the Sin Bet. Avraham Shalom, Ami Ayalon, Yuval Diskin and three other former leaders of this organization appear in a new Oscar-nominated Israeli documentary, The Gatekeepers. (Looks like a must-see.)

I admire their ability to think clearly and their moral courage to make these comments public. I know Mr. Netanyahu is not listening… but I hope some other leaders in Israel are.

 Posted by at 10:48 am

When 0% is not 0%

 Commerce  No Responses »
Mar 022013
 

Recently, I needed a bit of cash and I decided to take advantage of one of those “0% interest” loan offers that regularly appears in my mailbox for several of my credit cards. It was very easy to do of course, all I had to do was to deposit a check in my bank account.

But when the credit card statement arrived next month, I was in for a surprise. True, the loan was at 0% interest, just as advertised. However, what I neglected to take into account was that this credit card actually had an insurance contract attached to it. I never kept a balance on this card, so whether or not it had insurance was completely irrelevant to me… until now, when I suddenly noticed that my supposedly 0% interest loan suddenly increased by a full 1% in just a month! (Actually, 1.08% to be precise, because the insurance was also subject to provincial sales tax.)

Needless to say, I called up the bank and immediately canceled this ridiculous insurance, cursing myself for not having done this sooner. (Live and learn.) Another month went by and a new bill arrived. Behold! That 1% of the original loan amount that they added in the form of insurance qualified as a “purchase”, with interest calculated at the standard (albeit rather usurious) rate of 17.99%. And of course you cannot pay off just this amount; any payment you make to the card will be distributed by this particular bank proportionately between the lower and higher interest rate amounts that you owe, so 99% of the payment I made went against the 0% interest original loan amount.

My cash crunch was long over, so I phoned the bank and simply told them that unless they are willing to rectify this situation, I am going to pay of this card immediately and close the account. To their credit, they rectified the problem right away (or so they said; it’s not yet reflected when I check the account over the Internet, but hopefully all will be well when next month’s bill arrives.)

But it got me thinking: how does this scam (for I do not really have a better word for it) work when it involves people less attentive to numbers than I?

So let’s say you start with a $5,000 loan that you take out at the promised 0% interest for, let’s say, 12 months. You naively expect that if you keep paying the minimum payment (1% each month) then by the end of the 12 months, you will have payed off $568.08, with $4,431.92 still owing. Well… not exactly.

What actually happens is that you will have paid a total of $602.64 at the minimum rate. Yet your final balance at the end of the year is $5,094.40, so you now owe $94.40 more than you originally borrowed. In the intervening twelve months, the bank will have charged you $602.52 in credit insurance; $48.14 in sales tax (at the Ontario provincial rate of 8%); and a further $47.99 in interest on these “purchases”.

Lumping it all together, it amounts to an effective interest rate of 14% that you ended up paying on a loan that was advertised at a 0% interest rate.

And this if you did not use your card for anything else. Remember, when you make a payment, this particular bank (and probably, many/most others) applies your payment proportionately to the lower and higher interest rate portions of the total amount you owe. So you cannot just pay off your high interest purchases at the end of the month; they will keep on accruing interest so long as your 0% interest loan remains on your account.

At times like this, I regret not being religious. Otherwise, I could believe as Dante that usurers get what they deserve in the afterlife:

“Turn thee around, I pray thee, backward look
“There where thou sayest usury gives offence
“To goodness infinite and the knot untie.”

“Philosophy,” he said, “th’ observant mind,
“Teaches this truth, not in one place alone,
“That Nature takes her method and her course

“From the divinte intelligence and art;
“And if thy physics thou hast studied well,
“Then thou before thou readest far shalt find

“That this thy art, so far as it hath pow’r
“Follows as pupil in his master’s steps;
“So of God’s child thine art seems almost child.

“From these two, then, if thou in mem’ry hold’st
“The earlier Genesis, it is decreed
“That life must spring, and man’s increase must come.

“But then the usurer treads another path;
“Nature and her attendant both he scorns,
“Since in another means he places hope.”

 Posted by at 10:56 am

Wingless Dragon?

 Space  2 Responses »
Mar 012013
 

I was watching the seemingly flawless launch of SpaceX’s resupply flight to the ISS and like others, I was flabbergasted when the Webcast was suddenly blacked out (“Please Stand By”), then the flight director came on, announced that the spacecraft was experiencing an anomaly and more information will be provided at a press conference in a few hours and… that’s it. Webcast ends.

So like other good early 21st century netizens, I turned to Twitter: the speculation is that the spacecraft may have failed to deploy its solar arrays, perhaps because there was no fairing separation. This is Bad News. Some speculated that Dragon has sufficient battery power to make it to the ISS and that a spacewalk might fix things, but I don’t think things are that simple.

I guess there is nothing to do but wait for that press conference.

The live video was breathtaking, by the way. Watching the bell of the second stage engine glow yellowish-red was amazing.

spacex-small

So… my fingers remain firmly crossed.

 Posted by at 10:40 am

Yahoo! and working from home

 Internet, Society  No Responses »
Feb 272013
 

yahooThere has been a lot of discussion lately about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban working from home at her company.

Many criticized her decision. Some of them raised some good points about productivity and flexibility, and the ability to accommodate workers such as expectant women.

Others supported her decision, pointing out that at Yahoo! more than at other similar high-tech companies, slackers have abused work at home privileges to such an extent that some barely did any work for Yahoo! at all.

But there is one thing conspicuously missing from this discussion: why should Ms. Mayer concern herself with this issue in the first place? Why is she micromanaging her workforce? Should it not be up to lower-level managers to decide who can work from home and why, how, and when?

 Posted by at 1:50 pm

Pastagate

 Canada, Language, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Feb 272013
 

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Quebec’s recent language police fiasco, an overzealous Office québécois de la langue française cracking down on an Italian restaurant for its use of the non-French word “pasta” and other, similar terms on its menu. Of course I’ve been reading a lot about it lately; apparently, its news coverage exceeded by a factor of 60 (!) the coverage Quebec premier Pauline Marois received during her recent trip to drum up foreign investment in the province.

Yes, I could go on lamenting the superficiality of the news media these days, and I think I would be right. But I am thinking about Pastagate now for a different reason: I am wondering if I am the only one seeing strong parallels between a zealous police force guarding the integrity of a language and a zealous police force guarding the integrity of a religion.

At least officers of the language police do not come with canes.

 Posted by at 10:49 am

Racist fodder from Canada’s government

 Canada, Hungary, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 272013
 

It didn’t take very long for Hungary’s far right to turn the Canadian government’s giant billboards into a fascist meme.

 

Reacting to comments by Jason Kenney about the plummeting numbers of refugee claimants from Hungary, the infamous far-right Web site kuruc.info responded with a twisted version of the giant billboard placed by our ever so compassionate Conservative government in strategic locations in Hungary… namely, places with a high percentage of Roma population. The original billboards advised would be refugee claimants about the accelerated claims process. The version of kuruc.info is slightly different. It reads:

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE HUNGARIAN PEOPLE

Gypsies! We have had enough of you! Get out of here!

This is not your home!
To facilitate faster processing, we would rather pay!

Budapest – Delhi: only HUF 166,500

Don’t laugh, Jew, this also applies to you.

In the lower right, the official logo of Canada’s government is replaced by a map of “greater Hungary”.

I hope Messrs. Harper and Kenney are proud of the fodder they provided to these proud protectors of the Hungarian nation.

 Posted by at 8:51 am

Getting caught

 Canada, Legal, Politics  1 Response »
Feb 252013
 

moneySo, well, I don’t wish to jump on a politically motivated populist bandwagon over what, in the big scheme of things, is just (very) small change but still, let me try to get this straight.

Apparently, if I defraud the Canadian government to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars and I am dumb enough to get caught, all I have to say is “oops, I made a mistake”, offer to repay the funds I stole, and all is forgiven.

If only the world worked this way. Except that, well, it does, at least if you are a Canadian senator, like the honorable (?) Mike Duffy. Claiming that it was just an accounting mistake (the forms were apparently too complicated) Mr. Duffy not only offered to repay the $100,000 (give or take) that he stole, he now has the audacity to call the attention surrounding his case a “distraction” that interferes with the important work he is doing for his “home province”, Prince Edward Island, where he hasn’t lived in many decades.

No, Mr. Duffy, it’s not a distraction. It means simply that you tried to steal our money and you got caught. And what you did, embezzling the government to the tune of a hundred grand, is something that would land most of us ordinary mortals in jail for a significant amount of time as common criminals.

 Posted by at 3:41 pm

Trip to Mars

 Space, Transportation  No Responses »
Feb 212013
 

The news is that Dennis Tito, the first ever space tourist to go to the International Space Station, is planning a privately financed manned flyby mission to Mars in 2018.

I don’t know how feasible it is. I actually have doubts that they will succeed. And the scientific value of such a mission would likely be negligible.

Even so… I dearly hope that they succeed. And if they asked me to go, I’d sign up without hesitation, despite the prospect of spending 500 days with another human being locked up in a tiny capsule, despite the significant probability that we won’t make it back alive.

It is okay to think about the economics, technical feasibility, and scientific value of a space mission, but all too often these days, we forget that other thing: inspiration. Sometimes, that’s worth a great deal. A generation of Soviet scientists and engineers inspired by Sputnik or the flight of Gagarin, and a generation of American scientists and engineers inspired by Apollo and Armstrong’s “one small step” can bear witness of this.

 Posted by at 7:01 pm

Austerity dead end

 Economy, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 212013
 

I consider myself a fiscal conservative. I like the idea of small governments, balanced budgets, low taxes. But… not at all costs.

Austerity is the worst possible response to an economic crisis. The world should have learned this during the Great Depression. But it didn’t.

Or rather, North America did, as it chose stimulus spending over austerity despite the fact that America was led by a conservative president and Canada, by a conservative prime minister at the time. Giving credit where credit is due, I think we should thank Messrs. Bush and Harper for their willingness to put aside ideology and implement pragmatic policies, even if they might have done so kicking and screaming.

Not so in Europe, where austerity prevailed in the countries worst affected by the recession. And the result speaks for itself, most loudly perhaps in Greece. After years of austerity, the Greek economy is in shambles; Athens is crippled by smog because of all the wood burning as a result of drastic tax increases on natural gas and fuel oil; and instead of going down, the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio continues to increase relentlessly, as tax revenues dropped more rapidly than government expenditures as a result of the cutbacks.

 Posted by at 3:24 pm
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