Dvorak on Windows 8

 Computers  No Responses »
Jan 122013
 

The name of John C. Dvorak has been known in the personal computer industry for decades. Sure, he didn’t always get everything right (among his most famous missed predictions was predicting the failure of Apple’s Macintosh and the iPhone) but he is right more often than he is wrong.

This time around, Dvorak set his sights on Windows 8. He is demanding nothing less than a complete makeover of Microsoft’s new operating system: get rid of the touchscreen nonsense and give us back a decent, fully functional desktop operating system that is unhindered by the new touch UI that amounts to little more than a useless, misguided splash page.

I couldn’t agree more. However… I do not plan to hold my breath.

 Posted by at 11:02 am

Why hackers have it easy

 Computer Security  No Responses »
Jan 122013
 

The SANS Institute is one of the preeminent firms in Internet security. I subscribe to their security-related mailing lists for all the obvious reasons, and I also receive their print course catalog on a regular basis.

I was flipping through the pages of the latest when I came across this gem (which should really belong among Jay Leno’s Headlines, assuming viewers of The Tonight Show could actually tell the difference between Unix and Windows):

winlin

Which leaves me wondering if SANS really can’t tell the difference between the two operating systems. (They probably can.) Or perhaps it’s the US Navy that cannot? (I doubt it.) Or perhaps the real problem, apart from careless proofreading, is that these security training courses have become rigid and mechanical, predictable even, which is precisely why hackers seem to have so little trouble penetrating even military networks?

 Posted by at 10:57 am

Google and privacy

 Internet  No Responses »
Jan 112013
 

Message to Google: please do NOT start uploading photos from my phone to Google+ without first asking for my bleeping permission. I don’t care if only I see the pictures. I don’t want you to upload crap from my phone without asking, is that clear?

 Posted by at 11:05 pm

Kate Middleton’s charmectomy

 Art, Canada  No Responses »
Jan 112013
 

I may be a loyalist royalist but I don’t usually much care about the comings and goings of the Royal Family and I am no art critic either. However, I cannot refrain from commenting on the official portrait of Kate Middleton. It’s like all the goodness has been sucked out of her. Like a charmectomy operation. All the warmth that makes her photographs such a pleasure to look at… none if it is present in the painting. What was the artist thinking?

charming-kate          charmless-kate
 Posted by at 12:01 pm

The Weyl-Lanczos equation

 Physics  No Responses »
Jan 092013
 

BlackHole-tinyA few weeks ago, I exchanged a number of e-mails with someone about the Lanczos tensor and the Weyl-Lanczos equation. One of the things I derived is worth recording here for posterity.

The Lanczos tensor is an interesting animal. It can be thought of as the source of the Weyl curvature tensor, the traceless part of the Riemann curvature tensor. The Weyl tensor, together with the Ricci tensor, fully determine the Riemann tensor, i.e., the intrinsic curvature of a spacetime. Crudely put, whereas the Ricci tensor tells you how the volume of, say, a cloud of dust changes in response to gravity, the Weyl tensor tells you how that cloud of dust is distorted in response to the same gravitational field. (For instance, consider a cloud of dust in empty space falling towards the Earth. In empty space, the Ricci tensor is zero, so the volume of the cloud does not change. But its shape becomes distorted and elongated in response to tidal forces. This is described by the Weyl tensor.

Because the Ricci tensor is absent, the Weyl tensor fully describes gravitational fields in empty space. In a sense, the Weyl tensor is analogous to the electromagnetic field tensor that fully describes electromagnetic fields in empty space. The electromagnetic field tensor is sourced by the four-dimensional electromagnetic vector potential (meaning that the electromagnetic field tensor can be expressed using partial derivatives of the electromagnetic vector potential.) The Weyl tensor has a source in exactly the same sense, in the form of the Lanczos tensor.

The electromagnetic field does not uniquely determine the electromagnetic vector potential. This is basically how integrals vs. derivatives work. For instance, the derivative of the function \(y=x^2\) is given by \(y’=2x\). But the inverse operation is not unambiguous: \(\int 2x~ dx=x^2+C\) where \(C\) is an arbitrary integration constant. This is a recognition of the fact that the derivative of any function in the form \(y=x^2+C\) is \(y’=2x\) regardless of the value of \(C\); so knowing only the derivative \(y’\) does not fully determine the original function \(y\).

In the case of electromagnetism, this freedom to choose the electromagnetic vector potential is referred to as the gauge freedom. The same gauge freedom exists for the Lanczos tensor.

Solutions for the Lanczos tensor for the simplest case of the Schwarzschild metric are provided in Wikipedia. A common characteristic of these solutions is that they yield a quantity that “blows up” at the event horizon. This runs contrary to accepted wisdom, namely that the event horizon is not in any way special; a freely falling space traveler would never know that he is crossing it.

But as it turns out, thanks to the gauge freedom of the Lanczos tensor, it is easy to construct a solution (an infinite family of solutions, as a matter of fact) that do not behave like this at the horizon.

Well, it was a fun thing to compute anyway.

 Posted by at 3:08 pm

Deadly deep purple (and pink)

 Weather and Climate  No Responses »
Jan 092013
 

No, not Deep Purple the British hard rock group but deep purple the color. And pink… on Australian weather maps. These are the new colors to represent the temperature range between +50 and +54 degrees Centigrade.

Deadly deep purple (and pink)

There is another word to describe such temperatures: death. This is not funny anymore. If weather like this becomes more common, parts of our planet will simply become uninhabitable by humans without high technology life support (such as reliable, redundant air conditioning). In other words, it’s like visiting an alien planet.

 Posted by at 10:06 am

SIM card and rooting fun

 Canada, Communication  1 Response »
Jan 072013
 

SIM_CardI am supposed to be a geek but I guess I also have some chicken genes, since I never felt a particularly great urge to risk bricking my smartphone just for the sake of being able to run geeky apps on it that require root permission.

This all changed now that I actually have a spare smartphone, having accepted an early upgrade offer from Rogers. This spare, a SONY Xperia X10, served me faithfully for over two years. It is still a pretty decent phone, but I admit I like our new Samsung phones better.

So what does a cowardly geek do with a spare smartphone? Why, exactly what he did not dare to do while that smartphone was still in service. First, he tries to root it… which turned out to be a relatively easy process, although there were some tripping points like making sure that you enable USB debugging.

But while rooting the phone did let me do some fun things with it, the phone was still locked to the Rogers network. So I decided to take the plunge and purchase an unlock code for the grand total of about eight bucks from cellunlocker.net. (I picked this unlock provider after doing a bit of research; they seemed cheap yet reliable.) It took a bit longer than promised to get the unlock code (almost a full day instead of a few hours) but it worked as advertised.

So how do you test if the phone is unlocked? Well, it says that it is unlocked, but is it? My wife’s Samsung phone says it’s unlocked, too, but it rejects non-Rogers SIM cards. How do I know? I actually have two non-Rogers SIM cards, a non-registered one from a data stick I used to use in Hungary, and a registered and valid SIM card from my TELUS data stick. I shoved this one into the X10 and presto… it works! In fact, much to my surprise, it seems to work as a phone, too, although I am loathe to try to make calls with it, as I have no idea how much TELUS would charge for a voice call on what is supposedly a data only plan.

So what will I do the next time I travel overseas? Take this X10 with me to use with a local provider’s SIM? Or perhaps unlock my new Samsung phone? Sounds like a plan… maybe I’ll have the courage to do so this time. For what it’s worth, I did order a cheap micro-SIM cutter and a set of adapters that will help me cut down a regular SIM card to the size the Samsung phone accepts, yet still use that SIM card in other phones.

It will be fun.

 Posted by at 10:42 pm

Negative temperature

 Physics  No Responses »
Jan 042013
 
Carr, Science 2013; 339:42-43

Carr, Science 2013; 339:42-43

No, the title of this entry is not in reference to another miserably cold Ottawa winter (it’s not that cold, actually; I’ve seen a lot worse) but the absolute temperature scale.

Remember back in high school, when you were first taught that nothing can be colder than 0 degrees Kelvin? Well… you can’t say that anymore.

There are a variety of ways of formulating thermodynamics. Perhaps the cleanest is axiomatic thermodynamics, in which simple relationships like the conservation of energy or the existence of irreversible processes is codified in the form of axioms. One such axiom is often referred to as the Third Law of Thermodynamics; in essence, it postulates that a “ground state” of zero entropy exists, and associates this ground state with the start of the absolute temperature scale.

A little messier is classical statistical physics, where temperature is defined as the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom. Still, since kinetic energy cannot be negative, its average cannot be negative either, so it’s clear that there exists a lowest possible temperature at which all classical particles are at rest.

But statistical physics leads to another way of looking at temperature: as a means of calculating probabilities. The probability \(P_i\) of finding a particle in a state \(i\) with kinetic energy \(E_i\) will be proportional to the Boltzmann distribution:

$$P_i\propto e^{-E_i/kT},$$

where \(k\) is Boltzmann’s constant ant \(T\) is the temperature.

And here is where things get really interesting. For if it is possible to create an ensemble of particles in which \(P_i\) follows a positive exponential distribution, that clearly implies a negative temperature \(T\).

And this is precisely what has been reported in Science this week by Braun et al. (Science 2013; 339:52-55): an experimentally realized state of ultracold bosons with a distribution of kinetic (motional) energy states that follows a positive exponential curve. In other words… matter at temperature below 0 K.

How about that for a bit of 21st century physics.

 Posted by at 7:16 am

21st century Stalinism

 History, Politics, Society  No Responses »
Jan 012013
 

I was reading about Kim Jong Un’s unusual New Year’s message when I came across this video, a documentary by Dutch filmmaker Pieter Fleury, titled North Korea: A day in the life:

Even though it’s a few years old (it was made in 2004) and despite the fact that it was obviously made under the watchful eyes of North Korea’s censors, it still speaks volumes about the world’s last Stalinist state.

 Posted by at 5:52 pm

Happy 2013!

 Personal  1 Response »
Dec 312012
 

To all my family and friends, to all good people everywhere… happy 2013!

For me, 2012 was… interesting. Business-wise, it was not a good year (indeed, another year like 2011 and 2012 and I will be seriously worried). In other respects, however, it was a fruitful one. Our Pioneer results are now published, indeed we earned a place on the cover of Physical Review Letters, and also on the cover of IEEE Spectrum. I had several other papers accepted in respectable journals. I was also making some slow progress with my attempts to derive a weak-field formulation of Moffat’s gravity theory that would allow us to study extended distributions of matter, both continua and N-body systems.

My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary in September, and we survived a minor health crisis with no lasting ill effects. Our closest family members are also all in good health, so who are we to complain? The world, meanwhile, didn’t end despite a certain Mayan calendar’s dreaded predictions, the Eurozone is still there, the economy is limping ahead (at least here in North America), so for now, all is well. Now about that fiscal cliff…

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to 2013. I have some interesting contract work. I’ll be going to Texas to talk at a conference early in the coming year. And, I hope, I’ll be able to continue my work on modified gravity and achieve some useful results.

And last but not least… in a few months, I will be half a century old. A strange milestone, as I am still wondering what I’ll be when I grow up.

 Posted by at 8:16 pm

A candle for Damini

 Legal, Society  No Responses »
Dec 312012
 

google-indiaFor a while today, Google India had a solitary candle on its start page. It was in memory of the “Delhi braveheart”, also called Damini (lightning in Hindi) by some. She was the 23-year old woman who was brutally raped and sodomized on a bus in New Delhi. Her identity remains undisclosed for now for legal reasons; some argue that she should be named in order to properly honor her in death, others suggest that the power of her legacy is amplified by the fact that her identity is not known.

Either way… what happened to her is sickening and unconscionable. The details are too brutal even to think about. It is difficult to comprehend that there are males on this planet who think of women not as soulmates, companions for life or mothers of their children, but as objects to be brutally abused and then discarded, left to die in a ditch.

I am opposed to the death penalty on principle but I will not shed a single tear if these six animals are executed. In fact, I am ashamed to admit that I’d probably torture them to death if it were up to me. But then… two wrongs do not make a right. Nothing will bring Damini back to life. So perhaps instead of thinking about retribution, we should think about preventing future attacks of this nature. Communicating the idea that there is nothing “macho” about treating a woman like a used blow-up doll might be a good beginning.

 Posted by at 8:15 pm

A haunting message from China

 Commerce, Economy, Society  No Responses »
Dec 302012
 

Haunting letter from ChinaHere is a reason why I prefer not to buy goods made in China. Some of the goods from that country may have been made in “re-education through labor” camps.

In other words, forced labor.

And last year, a camp inmate had the courage to smuggle a letter into the packaging of a Halloween decoration kit. The package sat unopened by its purchaser for a year, when she finally decided to put up some Halloween decorations.

Note to retailers: I am more than happy to pay a premium for goods made in Canada or the US, by free people earning decent wages. And, while I may be in a minority for the time being, I am pretty sure I am not alone.

 Posted by at 8:36 am

Franchise novel

 Books, History, Television  No Responses »
Dec 252012
 

Deforest_Kelly_Dr_McCoy_Star_TrekI am so not into “franchise” novels, novels that are written-to-order, set in the universe of an established franchise like Star Trek. Like franchise computer games, franchise novels tend to be hollow, weak, transparent attempts to capitalize from the success of the original work.

I like Star Trek. Over the years, I did read the occasional Star Trek “franchise” story, but they did not leave much of an impression. So I was not particualrly motivated to read another.

That said, when I recently read about Provenance of Shadows by David R. George III, a franchise novel written to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the series, for reasons I can no longer recall I became sufficiently intrigued to read the sample chapters on Google Books. They were enough to get me to buy the book. I do not regret doing so.

Spoiler alert

This book tells the story of an alternate timeline. Namely, the alternate timeline created by the events in the famous Star Trek episode “The City at the Edge of Forever”, in which Dr. McCoy finds himself in 1930 and, as we later learn, by preventing the death of a social worker, gravely alters history. The social worker, Edith Keeler, is a devoted pacifist; in the alternate timeline, she launches a pacifist movement that becomes powerful enough to delay the entry of the United States into World War II. This gives Hitler a chance to achieve victory on the Eastern Front, Japan a chance to conquer much of the South Pacific including New Zealand and parts of Australia, and most alarmingly, gives the Nazi atomic bomb project a head start.

I find this “alternate history” timeline compellingly believable. We tend to think that the defeat of the Nazis was a historical inevitability but it was by no means preordained. Suppose the United States adopts a different posture in the Pacific in the late 1930s and early 1940s, so that Japan has easier access to raw materials and oil, and feels less threatened by the US Navy. Suppose this convinces Japan that defeating the US is not a priority. No Pearl Harbor in 1941 means no opportunity for Stalin to move a huge, well-equipped and experienced winter fighting force from Siberia to Moscow, and the first successful Soviet counteroffensive never happens. There is a good chance, then, that Hitler would have captured Moscow in early 1942 and after that, Stalin’s government may have collapsed. With the resources of the Soviet Union secured, Hitler would have finished “pacifying” Western Europe, including Great Britain. Had this happened, the world in which we live would be a very different place today.

McCoy’s struggles to avoid altering history and later, to understand how he altered history, and his struggles to come to term with his own demons both in this alternate history and also, back in the 23rd century in the original timeline, make this book a compelling read. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

 Posted by at 2:58 pm

Equality

 Politics, Society  No Responses »
Dec 232012
 

A Facebook friend shared this image, a cartoon about conservative vs. liberal views on equality:

540185_10151296602148467_1486491679_n

Looking at the image, I realize that deep in my soul, I am in fact a conservative. That’s because I see another variation of the same picture (and it’s not the crudeness of my art to which I am referring):

equality

Then again, if I am a conservative, so was Kurt Vonnegut. Why else would he have written a story like Harrison Bergeron, in which a totalitarian state uses a form of mind control to create equality between intellectually gifted and less talented people?

Or perhaps I am neither a conservative nor a liberal (and the same goes for Kurt Vonnegut). Instead, I am trying to use rational thinking to decide what’s best in a given situation, without resorting to ideology or dogma.

 Posted by at 1:54 pm

Shoveling

 Local Ottawa, Personal, Transportation  No Responses »
Dec 212012
 

My other extracurricular activity today involved a shovel.

That is because we ended up with quite a few inches of wet, heavy snow, courtesy of this year’s first major winter storm. And I like to shovel the snow off my balcony, rather than let it rot the deck and leak in through our balcony door.

At least I didn’t have to go anywhere. Those who did had a hard time on the roads. A poor double-decker actually ended up in the ditch this morning.

But hey, we’re all still alive! Contrary to certain Mayan prophecies, the world did not come to an end. The daily struggle of our existence continues.

 Posted by at 10:31 pm
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