Spinor Info

Feline confrontation

Sep 072013

We used to have a cat named Tarka. (It’s a Hungarian word for mottled, spotted, etc.) She showed up at our doorstep in 1999. Winter was just around the corner, the cat was obviously not doing well outside, and no-one was looking for her… so one day, we let her in.

Tarka was “not a very polite cat,” as a neighbor described her one day. Her characteristic sounds were hissing and howling, especially at other cats.

One such other cat was Bill, another stray that showed up in the neighborhood. Eventually, Bill was adopted by some people across the street, but in the winter of 1999/2000, Bill was still an outdoor cat who occasionally showed up on the small deck just outside our kitchen glass sliding door.

One morning, Tarka noticed Bill outside and she began howling. My video camera (yes, it was that long ago) was handy, so I started taping. The concert went on for several minutes until Bill got bored and left. But not before our other cat, Marzipan, showed up on the scene, no doubt wondering what this racket was all about.

Sadly, none of these cats are around anymore. The first one to leave us was Marzipan; ten months after this video was made, lymphoma killed him. Tarka stayed with us for another 11 years, until her ailing kidneys took her away. She mellowed as she aged, but she never really became what I would call a “polite” cat. And Bill spent 13 years with the family that adopted him before he, too, died earlier this year.

We have several other cats, who will hopefully stay with us for a long time. But I doubt we’ll ever have another cat as unique as Tarka was.

London pigeons

Environment, Personal No Responses »

Sep 072013

After spending a week in Hungary earlier this year, on my way back I stopped in London for three days. London is one of my favorite cities, and I haven’t spent any time there in years. My plan to enjoy myself was simple: get an Oyster card, take the Underground to random places, walk.

A few days before, still in Budapest, I badly twisted an ankle. Still, even this did not deter me, although it did slow me down; occasionally, I felt the need to sit down and rest my aching and swelling foot a little.

That’s precisely what happened one early evening in central London, where I found a tiny little park tucked in between two large office buildings near the Thames. Despite the fact that I was in the center of a world metropolis, it was eerily quiet in this spot, except for the loud singing of birds.

As soon as I sat down, I spotted a bunch of pigeons eating some crumbs from the pavement and occasionally fighting each other off. It was fascinating. My phone was with me, so I started capturing the scene on video.

Don’t expect anything spectacular. Just a bunch of pigeons living their lives in a big city. I don’t even like pigeons; many believe that they are flying rats, and I think they have a point. Still… these guys were funny. And the surrealist quiet of the spot I found right in the heart of a big city created an atmosphere that I will forever remember.

A visiting woodpecker

Environment, Local Ottawa, Personal No Responses »

Sep 062013

Two days ago, a woodpecker appeared on our linden tree. By the time I managed to grab my phone, it was gone.

Today, the bird reappeared and kindly stayed long enough for me to shoot a few minutes of video.

Nothing exciting here. Just a woodpecker doing what woodpeckers do, on a dead branch of our tree. I just found the bird fascinating, and I found it especially fascinating that a somewhat uncommon bird like this one would appear on a tree in a busy city.

Likelihood analysis and the parity of the LHC Higgs particle

Physics 1 Response »

Sep 062013

Last December, I wrote a blog entry in which I criticized one aspect of the LHC’s analysis of the scalar particle discovered earlier this year, which is believed to be the long sought-after Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is a scalar. It is conceivable that the particle observed at the LHC is not the Higgs particle but an “impostor”, some composite of known (and perhaps unknown) particles that behaves like a scalar. Or, I should say, almost like a scalar, as the ground state of such composites would likely behave like a pseudoscalar. The difference is that whereas a scalar-valued field remains unchanged under a reflection, a pseudoscalar field changes sign.

This has specific consequences when the particle decays, apparent in the angles of the decay products’ trajectories.

Several such angles are measured, but the analysis used at the ATLAS detector of the LHC employs a method borrowed from machine learning research, called a Boosted Decision Tree algorithm, that synthesizes a single parameter that has maximum sensitivity to the parity of the observed particle. (The CMS detector’s analysis uses a similar approach.)

The result can be plotted against scalar vs. pseudoscalar model predictions. This plot, shown below, does not appear very convincing. The data points (which represent binned numbers of events) are all over the place with large errors. Out of a total of only 43 events (give or take), more than 25% are the expected background, only 30+ events represent an actual signal. And the scalar vs. pseudoscalar predictions are very similar.

This is why, when I saw that the analysis concluded that the scalar hypothesis is supported with a probability of over 97%, I felt rather skeptical. And I thought I knew the reason: I thought that the experimental error, i.e., the error bars in the plot above, was not properly accounted for in the analysis.

Indeed, if I calculate the normalized chi-square per degree of freedom, I get $\chi^2_{J^P=0^+} = 0.247$ and $\chi^2_{J^P=0^-} = 0.426$, respectively, for the two hypotheses. The difference is not very big.

Alas, my skepticism was misplaced. The folks at the LHC didn’t bother with chi-squares, instead they performed a likelihood analysis. The question they were asking was this: given the set of observations available, what are the likelihoods of the scalar and the pseudoscalar scenarios?

At the LHC, they used likelihood functions and distributions derived from the actual theory. However, I can do a poor man’s version myself by simply using the Gaussian normal distribution (or a nonsymmetric version of the same). Given a data point $D_i$, a model value $M_I$, and a standard deviation (error) $\sigma_i$, the probability that the data point is at least as far from $M_i$ as $D_i$ is given by

\begin{align}
{\cal P}_i=2\left[1-\Psi\left(\frac{|D_i-M_i|}{\sigma_i}\right)\right],
\end{align}

where $\Psi(x)$ is the cumulative normal distribution.

Now ${\cal P}_i$ also happens to be the likelihood of the model value $M_i$ given the data point $D_i$ and standard distribution $\sigma_i$. If we assume that the data points and their errors are statistically indepdendent, the likelihood that all the data points happen to fall where they fell is given by

\begin{align}
{\cal L}=\prod\limits_{i=1}^N{\cal P}_i.
\end{align}

Taking the data from the ATLAS figure above, the value $q$ of the commonly used log-likelihood ratio is

\begin{align}
q=\ln\frac{{\cal L}(J^P=0^+)}{{\cal L}(J^P=0^-)}=2.89.
\end{align}

(The LHC folks calculated 2.2, which is “close enough” for me given that I am using a naive Gaussian distribution.)

Furthermore, if I choose to believe that the only two viable hypothesis for the spin-parity of the observed particle are the scalar and pseudoscalar scenarios (e.g., if other experiments already convinced me that alternatives, such as intepreting the result as a spin-2 particle, can be completely excluded) I can normalize these two likelihoods and interpret them as probabilities. The probability of the scalar scenario is then $e^{2.89}\simeq 18$ times larger than the probability of the pseudoscalar scenario. So if these probabilities add up to 100%, that means that the scalar scenario is favored with a probability of nearly 95%. Not exactly “slam dunk” but pretty darn convincing.

As to the validity of the method, there is, in fact, a theorem called the Neyman-Pearson lemma that states that the likelihood-ratio test is the most powerful test for this type of comparison of hypotheses.

But what about my earlier objection that the observational error was not properly accounted for? Well… it appears that it was, after all. In my “poor man’s” version of the analysis, the observational error was used to select the appropriate form of the normal distribution, through $\sigma_i$. In the LHC’s analysis, I believe, the observational error found its was into the Monte-Carlo simulation that was used to develop a physically more accurate probability distribution function that was used for the same purpose.

Even clever people make mistakes. Even large groups of very clever people sometimes succumb to groupthink. But when you bet against clever people, you are likely to lose. I thought I spotted an error in the analysis performed at the LHC, but all I really found were gaps in my own understanding. Oh well… live and learn.

Why the NSA undermines our digital security

Computer Security, Internet, Politics No Responses »

Sep 062013

So the NSA and their counterparts elsewhere, including Canada and the UK, are spying on us. I wish I could say the news shocked me, but it didn’t.

The level of secrecy is a cause for concern of course. It is one thing for these agencies not to disclose specific sources and methods, it is another to keep the existence of entire programs secret, especially when these programs are designed to collect data wholesale.

But my biggest concern is that the programs themselves represent a huge security threat for all of us.

First, the NSA apparently relies on its ability to compromise the security of encryption products and technologies or on backdoors built into these products. An unspoken assumption is that only the NSA would be able to exploit these weaknesses. But how do we know that this is the case? How do we know that the same weaknesses and backdoors used by the NSA to decrypt our communications are not discovered and then exploited by foreign intelligence agencies, industrial spies, or criminal organizations?

As an illustrative example, imagine purchasing a very secure lock for your front door. Now imagine that the manufacturer does not tell you that the locks are designed such that there exists a master key that opens them all. Maybe the only officially sanctioned master key is deposited in a safe place, but what are the guarantees that it does not get stolen? Copied? Or that the lock is not reverse engineered?

My other worry is about how the NSA either directly collects, or compels service providers to collect, and store, large amounts of data (e.g., raw Internet traffic). Once again, the unspoken assumption is that only authorized personnel are able to access the data that was collected. But what are the guarantees for that? How do we know that these databases are not compromised and that our private data will not fall into hands not bound by laws and legislative oversight?

These are not groundless concerns. As Edward Snowden’s case demonstrates, the NSA was unable to control unauthorized access even by its own contract employees working in what was supposedly a highly structured, extremely secure work environment. (How on Earth was Snowden able to copy data from a top secret system to a portable device? That violates just about every security rule in the book.)

So even if the NSA and friends play entirely above board and never act in an unlawful manner, these serious concerns remain.

I do not believe we, as citizens, should grant the authority to any state security apparatus to collect data wholesale, or to compromise the cryptographic security of our digital infrastructure. Even if it makes it harder to catch bad guys.

So, our message to the NSA, the CSE, the GCHQ and their friends elsewhere in the free world should be simply this: back off, guys. Or else, risk undermining the very thing you purportedly protect, our basic security.

Journalism at Radio Hungary

Hungary, Politics, Radio No Responses »

Sep 032013

szabad-radio I am reading a letter of resignation, written by a journalist who worked for the newsroom of Hungary’s public radio network until July this year. Unlike many of his colleagues who began their carriers in communist Hungary, Montreal-born Janos F. Antal was a Radio Free Europe correspondent. Here are some experts from this disturbing letter, in my rough translation:

“I was already working on the restoration of national sovereignty when many of you were still standing at stiff attention, listening to the Internationale […] At the time of ‘regime change’ I did not need to switch sides or become a turncoat, I just continued what I began much earlier, at Radio Free Europe…

“I am a spectator, not a participant; a chronicler, not an evangelist. A journalist – not a politician.

“All came to a head, however, when one day someone appeared behind my back and over my shoulder, staring at my monitor, began giving instructions to move this news item up, leave that one out, insert thit one, rewrite that – just like that, in such a tone.

“Moreover, this censorship brings about the growth of manipulative, propagandistic content. Once again the ‘repertoire’ includes production news of the type for which real demand existed only in the Kadar era.”

Yup, that’s Hungary’s national broadcaster in 2013.

Frederik Pohl

Books, Space No Responses »

Sep 032013

One of the giants of the golden era of science-fiction, indeed a co-author of one of the most influential science-fiction novels of all time, The Space Merchants, passed away yesterday, just a few weeks shy of his 94th birthday.

I think it would be a fitting tribute if a future space probe took his ashes to Venus and scattered it in the planet’s atmosphere.

Canned hunting

Cats, Politics, Society No Responses »

Aug 302013

I just watched a news item on CBC Ottawa about a Montreal woman who spent significant amounts of time and money to help raise a lion cub in what she thought was a lion sanctuary in South Africa, only to find out that her cub was being raised to be killed in a canned hunt.

Her lion may yet be saved thanks to her efforts and the donations she’s receiving, but countless other animals will not be as lucky, and not just in far-off third world lands like South Africa.

Apparently, many prominent supporters of the Second Amendment in the United States are also fans of this oh-so-macho practice. Never mind that the Second Amendment once codified a right of the people to deny the state a monopoly on forming an army, as a last resort guarantee of hard-earned freedoms in the American Revolution (against just the kind of decadent morons, I should add, who might be enjoying a canned hunt.) Apparently, the Second Amendment today is about the right to shoot a bird freshly released from a cage, perhaps learning for the first time in its life how to fly, just for the thrill of it, and then leaving the animal to die.

I find it hard to believe that even a I write this, there are people—not just any people, but all too often rich and wealthy people from enlightened first world societies, our “cream of the crop” if you wish—who get a hard-on from shooting a docile animal in an enclosed area. Now I don’t care if you happen to be a former president, vice president, head of the joint chiefs, or some other politician or celebrity. If you are a trophy hunter who shoots canned animals, you are a sick asshole.

Just to be clear, I am not a PETA freak. I may feel disturbed by how some farm animals are treated, but it has not yet made me stop eating meat. I still enjoy a fine filet mignon at a reputable steak house, or even the occasional cheeseburger. But let me repeat: if you are a trophy hunter who shoots canned animals, you are a sick asshole.

I know this is not a polite thing to say. I chose my words carefully and I thought about it long and hard before writing them down. I decided to do so when after I asked myself: would I say the same thing in person?

Yes, I would. People who shoot canned animals for fun are sick assholes and I do not want to have anything to do with them. I don’t want to socialize with them. I don’t want to do business with them and I don’t want their money, even if I happen to be badly in need of money. They may not be as bad as rapists or child molesters, but they come pretty darn close. Civilized society in 2013 should reject them regardless of their wealth or power. I know I do.

RIP, Bruce Murray

Space No Responses »

Aug 292013

Bruce Murray, a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founder of The Planetary Society passed away today.

May he rest in peace.

Thoughts on Syria

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Aug 292013

I keep wondering. Is military action in Syria desirable?

A friend of mine who knows the region well is convinced that Bashar al-Assad is indeed behind the chemical attack that took place a few days ago. Further, he believes that al-Assad is a murderer, that those who support him are increasingly isolated, and that most people in the Arab world would welcome a Western intervention, even Israeli involvement if need be, al-Assad is so bitterly hated.

My friend is credible, so his views dispelled some of the doubts I had about the people behind the attack (although I am still not fond of how certain politicians and some of the news media chose to replace information with fiery rhetoric. No, I will not be more pro-war just because you always attach the adjective “heinous” to the noun “attack”; I recognize words with zero information content.)

If my friend is right, military action is certainly justified on humanitarian grounds. And while support for military action in the United States remains low, it should not prevent the US government from doing the right thing.

But simply being just is not enough. The decision to involve the military should not be taken lightly. In particular, the military should be tasked with a goal that is clearly defined and achievable by military force. And while the military action is under way, political support should be complete and unconditional. You can’t win a half-hearted war; indeed, if your enemy knows that you are half-hearted about it, they can easily use this to their advantage and deny you the chance to succeed.

Is there a clearly defined goal in Syria?

I doubt it. Reports say that suspected chemical sites are off limits, as an attack on chemical stockpiles could cause grave damage, dispersing the chemical agents. So what would a limited strike accomplish? Remove al-Assad? Unlikely. A no-fly zone might help the opposition, but a no-fly zone is not being considered. So what, then? Degrade al-Assad’s military? That is not a clearly defined goal. And if al-Assad survives it all, he will come out stronger, being able to claim that he prevailed and thus “won” the war against America.

Is there a firm political commitment?

The US already has two, maybe three unfinished wars to deal with from the past decade. Iraq has become for all practical intents and purposes a vassal state of Iran and scores of people still die there every day in sectarian attacks. In Afghanistan the fight is still on, and there is a good chance that the planned US withdrawal will hand the country to the Taliban on a platter. And then there is Libya; sure, Gaddafi is dead, but what came after is not pretty.

I understand the desire to “do something”. I appreciate the frustration of people of Syrian descent, some of whom I know personally, who’d like the West to be involved. But without a clear military goal and an unambiguous political commitment… I am concerned that any such attack would be pointless and perhaps even counterproductive.

On this note though… I think Stephen Harper should have been a little more unambiguous. This “we support our allies but we have no military plans” is a weasel’s way out, which is very unbecoming of Canada. You are either for it or against it. You cannot have it both ways.

Short films

Canada, Film No Responses »

Aug 272013

The other day, I caught a trio of short films on the CBC, in a program called Short Film Faceoff. I especially liked Frost, a science-fiction short depicting a dystopian future, but OMG was also excellent.

Now these films are all available online, along with another three that were shown the previous week. I haven’t watched those yet. There will be another batch coming this weekend.

Powerful women

Society No Responses »

Aug 272013

In the last few days, I’ve been reading about some powerful businesswomen and the stories of their success.

First, I read a somewhat long but rather intriguing biography of Yahoo! boss Marissa Mayer.

Like many, I also wrote off Yahoo! in my mind as one of the has-beens, destined to the scrap heap of Internet history along with other former giants like Altavista of Lycos. But, it appears, Ms. Mayer may be able to turn Yahoo! around, defying the odds. I hope she is successful.

Then on Sunday, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interviewed Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, a company with an innovative line of female undergarments.

Ms. Blakey is described as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Hers is the story of a door-to-door fax machine salesman turned entrepreneur who just never took no for an answer. Yet she seemed genuinely down-to-Earth, humble even, when she was interviewed.

The glass ceiling may not be a thing of the past just yet, but these ladies are certainly hastening its demise.

Don’t be INSPIREd without due precautions

Legal, Politics No Responses »

Aug 242013

I advise my good friends in the United Kingdom and perhaps in Australia to pause and think before clicking on the following link:

http://publicintelligence.net/aqap-inspire-issue-11/

The link is to a blog site that is dedicated to discussions about the public’s right to access information. Specifically, to a blog entry that discusses the latest issue of Al Qaeda’s “open source terrorism” magazine, INSPIRE. They also provide an archive of present and past issues of INSPIRE.

And herein lies the problem. Apparently in the UK, and perhaps also in Australia, mere possession of INSPIRE is a crime, regardless of the reason.

Having grown up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, I find this deeply troubling.

Chelsea Manning and Russia Today

Politics, Society No Responses »

Aug 222013

In recent days, the Kremlin-funded 24-hour news network, Russia Today, spent a fair amount of their airtime discussing the case of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked large chunks of information to Wikileaks a few years ago and was recently sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The breaking news this morning is that Bradley Manning expressed his desire to begin hormone therapy, eventually undergo a gender reassignment operation, and live his, or rather, her life as a woman named Chelsea Manning.

I wonder how Russia Today will deal with this in the wake of Russia’s recently enacted, Draconian anti-gay legislation.

[Correction: In the first version of this blog entry, I referred to the network as “Russia Times”. Its name is actually Russia Today, or more precisely, just RT.]

Living in the nuclear age

Environment, History, Politics No Responses »

Aug 092013

Today was the 68th anniversary of the last (for now) use of a nuclear weapon in anger, three days following the first such use. The city of Nagasaki was destroyed by the explosion of Fat Man, the world’s second plutonium bomb; the first one was used less than a month earlier at the Trinity test site in New Mexico.

Since then, more than two thousand nuclear explosions took place on or beneath the surface of the Earth as declared nuclear powers tested their designs.

Verizon Canada woes

Canada, Internet, Personal 1 Response »

Aug 072013

Visitors to my blog or Web sites may have noticed that in the past week, my Web pages loaded more slowly than usual, and may even have been unavailable at times.

The reason: shortly before noon, July 30, I lost my primary Internet connection.

This connection was via a legacy DSL service (bridged DSL) to a company that used to be UUNet Canada, was purchased by MCI, and eventually, by Verizon, and now does business under the Verizon Canada name.

Yes, the same Verizon that is about to enter the Canadian wireless market, much to the concern of Canada’s “big three”, Bell, Rogers and Telus.

I noticed the service interruption essentially immediately, and reported it to Verizon. First, they suggested that it was a telco problem; indeed, Bell Canada even wanted to send out a technician, but fortunately, I was able to talk them out of this. (The DSL modem was connecting just fine.)

The service was not restored the next day, nor on August 1. But on August 1, I had a long discussion with a Verizon technician. The first thing I learned is that the technician resides in the Philippines. Back in the old days, when I had a technical issue with UUNet Canada, I usually ended up talking to an engineer in their Toronto network operations center, and my issue was resolved in minutes. Don’t get me wrong, the Philippines technician spoke accent-free English and had a basic level of understanding of the technology; but no real competence and, obviously, no decision-making authority.

What the technician did explain, however, is that Verizon made a colossal screw-up: they decommissioned some of their point-of-presence equipment here in Ottawa without first moving all customers who were still using said equipment. The technician told me that they were scrambling to find a solution, and I’ll be back up and running within a few days.

Well… that was August 1. A long weekend then came and went, but still, no Internet service. So on Tuesday, August 5, I called Verizon Canada. Their main 800 number was answered by a pleasant sounding young lady (an intern, I later learned) but on my first two calls, she managed to connect me to two different voice mailboxes, whereas on the third try, I got disconnected. On the fourth try, she made a real effort to reach someone within the company. She was ready to give up (providing me with an e-mail address instead) but when I told her that I’d rather wait on hold a little longer, she finally managed to get me connected to a senior manager.

This gentleman was friendly and competent enough, and certainly understood and appreciated the severity of my situation. I explained to him that I was already taking steps to switch to Bell Canada as my primary Internet provider. He promised to look into my situation and find a solution. He asked for a day. I asked him to call me this morning, because I wanted to make a decision today, one way or another.

He called indeed at the promised time, but all he could tell me was that he was still waiting for some technical folks to come out of a meeting. Okay, we agreed that he’d call again before 2 PM. He sent an e-mail at 2:09 PM, saying that it would take just a tad longer.

At 3:45 PM, I e-mailed and then called him. No answer. So a few minutes later, it was the end of the line for me: I called and e-mailed again, this time instructing Verizon to terminate my service. I then contacted Bell and asked them to initiate setting up my new account.

Now let’s be clear for a moment: I am not talking about some cheap $20/month wireless contract. I was paying^★ a premium, to the tune of several hundred dollars, to Verizon for this service. And I’ve been their customer (with a a short interruption) since way back in 1994. If my experience is indicative of the kind of service Verizon provides, all I can say to people cheering the prospects of Verizon’s entry into the Canadian wireless market is to be careful what they wish for.

It will be a few days before my new service with Bell is up and running. I am sure there will be headaches, but I am hopeful that it won’t be too much of a hassle. Meanwhile, I am relying on a backup service that I set up two years ago with Rogers, when my Verizon service was down for a few days (that time, it was actually Bell’s fault, or so I was told.) This service is a little slower, but at least it works (for now).

^★I said “I was paying a premium”, but in the last few months, I really wasn’t. Not my fault… I really tried giving them my money. Earlier this year, Verizon moved their Canadian business customers to their pre-existing Enterprise system that combines billing, online payments, service calls, etc. I dutifully set up my account as instructed and made many attempts to pay. The system accepted my credit card, informed me that my payment was processed, but charges never actually appeared on my credit card account. Last month, I contacted Verizon and after some lengthy phone calls with their billing department, also located in the Philippines, they finally told me that the problem has been found and fixed. Well… no charges appeared on my credit card account yet. Funny thing is, when I check with Verizon, my account there shows no arrears. What can I say? If they don’t want my money… I just hope that if they do come to their senses and collect the outstanding invoice amounts, they don’t actually try to charge me for the month of August… the service, after all, went away on July 30 and it was never restored.

The Electrical Priest

Canada, History, Religion, Science, Transportation No Responses »

Jul 272013

I was watching RDI’s coverage of the memorial ceremony that was taking place last hour in Lac-Mégantic, the location of the horrific derailment a few weeks ago that claimed so many lives.

I was impressed by the size and beauty of Sainte-Agnés church where the mass was taking place, so I went to Google to find out more.

It was, of course, unsurprisingly difficult to find background material, as search results were dominated by recent articles about the disaster. But, after wading through some directory entries and such, I came across a true gem: the story of the “Electrical Priest”, Father Joseph-Eugene Choquette.

When he was not attending to his priestly duties, Father Choquette spent a fair bit of his time as an amateur scientist. And what an amateur he was!

Bringing a player piano to his church (and drawing the ire of his parishioners when they found out that it was not their vicar who was in secret a talented musician) was just one of his many pranks (perhaps an unintended one in this case). Apparently, he also liked to play with electricity, to the extent that visitors to his house were often shocked by a jolt of current when they touched a doorknob or sat down in a booby-trapped chair.

But Father Choquette was interested in more than mere pranks. He also experimented with telephony and electric lighting. Having installed a personal lighting system (powered by a dynamo hooked up to a windmill) that proved to be a success, he proceeded with a more ambitious plan: a generating plant to light the whole town. He remained directly involved with this project until his death; parishioners often found their vicar strapped to a pole 25 feet in the air, working on a faulty transformer.

When Father Choquette died, he left much of his equipment and collections to the Sherbrook and Saint-Hyacinthe Seminaries and to the Convent and College of Megantic. That was nearly a century ago. I wonder if any of his belongings still survive somewhere.

Marineland animal neglect

Canada, Health, Television No Responses »

Jul 242013

I grumbled once in this blog already about the incessant Marineland commercials on most Canadian channels this time of the year.

I still hate (desperately hate! As in, hate more than the sound of a hundred piecees of chalk screeching on a hundred chalkboards) the song, but I was hesitant to give them more publicity in my blog.

Until I came across a story from last August about animal suffering at the park.

Not exactly unexpected, to be honest, though even the singer who sings that horrendous jingle found the accusations shocking. She’d now prefer to see the jingle’s tag line replaced with “All the whales haaaate Marineland!”.

And I do, too, now for more than one reason.

Dementia unit

Health, Society No Responses »

Jul 212013

I was watching a report this morning by Sanjay Gupta on CNN about a unique Dutch facility caring for dementia patients.

Unofficially dubbed “dementia village“, the facility aims to provide a life for its residents that is as close to “normal” as possible.

Yet there is something creepy about a place that only has one way in and one way out, and it is locked and under surveillance. A place where freedom is illusory. Even Gupta could not resist making a comparison with The Truman Show: that the normalcy in “dementia village” is a fake, a deception.

True, it’s a deception that serves a noble purpose. Yet it reminded me of another fictitious facility: The Unit, as depicted in the eponymous novel by Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist, where people live out the last days of their lives while waiting to become organ donors.

Pioneer detectives

Personal, Physics, Space No Responses »

Jul 202013

I spent a part of yesterday afternoon speed-reading Konstantin Kakaes’s new e-book, The Pioneer Detectives. It’s a short book (still well worth the $2.99 Kindle price) but it reads very well and presents a fair picture of our efforts researching the origin of the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft.

Yes, I was one of those “detectives”. (In fact, I still consider myself one, as I don’t believe our job is quite done yet; we still owe the community a detailed account of our research and an update of our Pioneer Anomaly review before we can move on with a clean conscience.) So I have an insider’s view of this very intriguing story.

I had a chance to talk with Kakaes at length when he visited me here in Ottawa last year. Over the years, I learned to be apprehensive when talking to journalists; often, the words they put in your mouth bear little resemblance to what you actually said to them when interviewed. I was relieved that this was not the case now: at no time did I feel compelled to cringe while reading the book.

So I really enjoyed Kakaes’s telling of our story. Indeed, I think I learned a thing or two about presenting a complex subject to a non-specialist audience. Kakaes, an accomplished science journalist, manages to do so without dumbing it down with excessive oversimplifications.

One person whose views may not be as favorable is the original discoverer of the Pioneer anomaly, John Anderson. I am told that Anderson is not fond of our results. Kakaes believes that this is because Anderson is “blinded by his desire to believe in something new, in something unexplained. He wants so badly not to know.” Yes, scientists are people, too, and the prospect that a discovery you made, once thought profound, may just be an engineering fluke is not an easy one to swallow. Kakaes does what a responsible journalist must do: he tries to paint an objective picture, which sometimes includes unflattering bits. Yet I think that John Anderson has more scientific integrity than Kakaes gives him credit for.

And to be perfectly honest, I am also disappointed with our own results. When I first read about the Pioneer anomaly (as an outsider, long before my involvement) it seemed to fit perfectly into the big scheme: namely that perhaps the same physics that was responsible for significant deviations from Einstein’s and Newton’s predictions on cosmological and galactic scales might also be responsible for a small but measurable deviation here in the solar system. This was a fantastic prospect!

Sadly, it was not to be. What once seemed like a revolutionary, paradigm-shifting result has been reduced to a small footnote in the history of gravitational physics. Yet I think that our story is nonetheless intriguing. Kakaes seems to think so, too, judging by his book. A book that I am happy to recommend.

Older Entries Newer Entries