Spinor Info

Troubles in Mexico City

Sep 212012

Two years ago I attended a conference in Mexico City. We had many pleasant conversations with our hosts, who sadly told us that these days, Mexico City may be the safest part of the country… not because it is any safer than it was 20 years ago (when it qualified as the least safe) but because the rest of the country went downhill as a result of a perpetual drug war.

This is why I find these latest news so disturbing: it seems that the drug war may have reached a suburb of Mexico City. It appears that not even the capital is immune anymore.

Poetic justice

Politics 1 Response »

Sep 192012

Sometimes, there is justice.

It has been widely reported that a Pakistani man died the other day… as a result of breathing in the fumes of an American flag that they set on fire.

It does not happen that often, but sometimes, the world actually works the way it is supposed to.

(Part of me is wondering, though, exactly what material was that flag made of, in whatever Chinese sweatshop American flags are made in these days?)

Alien technology

Computers, Science, Technology 2 Responses »

Sep 182012

The other day, I purchased a 32 GB USB stick for fifteen dollars. 32 GB? That is four DVDs. Some 50 or so CD-ROMs. Almost 500 times the hard disk space that I had in my first IBM compatible PC. More than 22,000 3.5″ floppy disks. More than 200,000 single density 5.25″ floppy disks that I used to use with my Commodore 64. More than half a million times the RAM of that Commodore 64. More than 30 million times the memory of a Sinclair ZX-80 from 1980. For less than one tenth the price, I might add, even before adjusting for inflation.

Some people, when they contemplate these numbers, conclude that such leaps could not have just happened; surely, there is alien technology involved. The government knows.

Then again… if we had access to alien supertechnology, don’t you think that the capacity of electric storage batteries would have advanced more than the pitiful factor of 5 or so that distinguishes a modern Li-ion battery from its 150-year old lead-acid cousin?

Are Muslim extremists the real enemies of Mohammed?

Film, Politics, Religion No Responses »

Sep 132012

So an American (or not; the identity, ethnicity and nationality of the filmmaker(s) are not entirely clear) filmmaker creates a rather amateurish production bearing the title, The Innocence of Muslims, screened originally to an audience of less than 10 when it was first shown in a theater earlier this summer. To say that the movie is obscure is an understatement… It doesn’t even appear to have an entry in the Internet Movie Database (though chances are this will change soon.)

So what’s the best way to defend the honor of your Prophet? Why, how about launching a world-wide publicity campaign for this film, attacking embassies and consulates, burning American flags, and generally making sure that every news media talks about the film and its availability on YouTube. The trailer has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.

So, dear protesters, if your goal was to promote this hack job on your religion, give the filmmaker worldwide fame (and no doubt help him earn a few dollars in the process) and, incidentally, by murdering America’s ambassador to Libya, produce evidence that perhaps the movie’s point is not entirely to be dismissed, you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. Mohammed must be proud.

Fifty years

Personal, Politics, Space No Responses »

Sep 132012

Busy celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary yesterday, I forgot that there was another important anniversary on September 12: it was fifty years ago yesterday that a certain John F. Kennedy uttered the words, “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” And with those words, an astonishing sequence of events took place, and before the 1960s came to an end, two Americans indeed landed on the Moon… a technological feat the like of which the world has not seen since 1972, when the last of the Apollo Moon shots took place.

Twenty years

Personal No Responses »

Sep 122012

My wife and I have been married for exactly twenty years today. I hope the next twenty years will be at least as much fun for both of us as the first.

A microwave with a twist

Hungary, Internet No Responses »

Sep 122012

Seen on a Hungarian auction site, here is a used but functioning Whirlpool microwave oven, for the modest price of HUF 8,500 (about 40 bucks):

The picture looked a little weird, but I wasn’t paying it much attention until I read the first few buyers’ questions and the answers:

Dear Gaborka460! Do you happen to have a full-size mirror? Greetings, – Marci502
Dear Marci502! I don’t understand exactly, what do a full-size mirror and a microwave have in common? – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! :D:D Full-size mirror – the front of the microwave served as a mirror! :) – Police198
Dear Police198! I am really sorry, you are right, the reflection was a mistake by the person who took the picture. – Gaborka460

Person? Wait a cotton-picking minute, let’s look at it a bit more closely:

Yikes. That’s not some freakish, malformed turkey. It is a human alright. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

And the comments continued relentlessly. Here are some of the best questions and answers:

Dear Gaborka460! Your microwave is now famous! :) – Police198
Dear Police198! Weeell, I really didn’t mean it. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Is the person squatting inside just an illustration or does he come with the microwave? Thanks in advance for your answer. Greetings, – Setfly
Dear Setfly! The squattttting person is just an unfortunate, accidental image confusion. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Can we have this with a front panel depicting a female??? If so, does that change the price? – cukormeister
Dear cukormeister! Unfortunately not! Is this really important? – And then the darkness. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Would you please provide exact measurements as it is difficult to decide just by the picture alone if the male figure is hiding inside the microwave or just a reflection? And does the male thong come with the winning bid? Thanks: – retrobudai
Dear retrobudai! Is this really important? – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! A gym pass in exchange for the microwave. – gyuribacsi87
Dear Gaborka460! How much for the briefs+slippers, I offer a razor in exchange! – gyuribacsi87
Dear gyuribacsi87! I really don’t want to be vulgar! – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Forgive me, but do I see this right, is it really a broiled chicken in clogs sitting in the microwave? – NVShop
Dear NVShop! The picture is really bad, the question, dumb! – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! No, of course it’s not a bad picture, quite the contrary. It made many people smile today. It’s my heartfelt wish that this famous microwave soon be sold. – BudaiBrigi
Dear Gaborka460! 50,000 is my last offer. – seftelo1
Dear seftelo1! I don’t really understand?! My asking price is 8,500 for the microwave. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Sorry, you’re right. My mistake. Forgive my miserliness. I’ll give you 100,000 if we can hire you as a product photographer. – seftelo1
Dear Gaborka460! Nearly 150,000 views, that’s something:-) – Sikiferrari
Dear Sikiferrari! Weeeell; This is how to advertise! And it’s not even my expertise, and I didn’t mean to. – Gaborka460
Dear Gaborka460! Now that the microwave has sold, I’d like to know what you ask for the garden gnome in the swimming trunks that was inside? – RGgabor
Dear RGgabor! Asshole – Gaborka460

Even with this last comment, one has to admire the remarkable restraint of the seller, Gaborka460, and the overall civility of the discussion. Some of it may be due to vatera.hu’s commenting system or their moderators, of course. Still… it gave me a good laugh today. And the broiled chicken in clogs is well on its way towards becoming the newest Hungarian Internet meme.

Does the post office still deliver letters?

Commerce, Personal No Responses »

Sep 122012

That the main function of the post office is to deliver letters may be obvious to many, but apparently it wasn’t obvious to a postal employee today when my wife tried to mail an oversize letter to Hungary. It would be about $30 surface, or $60 air mail, said the young employee to my wife who was so surprised at first, she was unable to respond. Thankfully, a senior clerk overheard the conversation and eventually came to her colleague’s rescue, explaining to her that a letter is not a parcel. Actual cost? $4.20, for a letter weighing between 50 and 100 grams. Though I am seriously beginning to wonder if at least half that price is due to the inefficiencies of inept postal employees…

Protests, religious insults and threats

Film, Politics, Religion No Responses »

Sep 112012

At this moment, there are protesters ripping down US flags at the American embassy in Cairo, upset over some film (no idea which one, just repeating what I heard on CNN) that in their mind insults the prophet Mohammed (many Muslims like to add the phrase, “peace be upon him” to his name, but there is nothing peaceful about the name of a prophet in whose name suicide bombers kill innocents, even if most followers of Islam do not subscribe to such violence. No, I don’t think Christ represents peace either.)

I think it’s about high time we tell something to violent Islamists who believe it is alright to intimidate others who, in their view, offend their religion. You, Islamists, offend us. You offend one of our most sacred beliefs, our belief in the right to free speech and freedom of expression. And yes, if necessary, we are willing to resort to violence if that’s what it takes to protect these rights. And don’t think for one moment that our beliefs are less important to us than your beliefs are to you. So what shall it be? Shall we go on and murder each other in the name of our mutually incompatible beliefs? (Don’t forget, there is a good chance that we might win. Westerners have become rather good at this war business after two world wars and countless smaller ones, and we are armed to the teeth. We also invented industrialized murder, you know, Auschwitz and all that.) Or shall we just let each other be?

I suggest the latter. And if you believe that there is a veiled threat behind this suggestion, you might not be wrong.

So next time you hear about a film that you don’t like, here is an easy solution: don’t watch it. Then we can just happily leave each other alone.

Kafkaesque

Books, Internet, Society No Responses »

Sep 082012

Here is a scary story: after a university professor referred jokingly to two absentee students as “spooks”, he became the subject of allegations of racism despite being well-known for his previous work on civil rights and racial equality. It so happened that the two missing students were African American, a fact of which the professor was unaware.

This Kafkaesque nightmare was the inspiration of a novel, “The Human Stain”, by author Philip Roth. Yet the novel itself became part of a Kafkaesque story on Wikipedia recently. That is because the Wikipedia entry falsely stated that the novel’s inspiration was a New York writer. When Roth asked for the article to be corrected, he was told by a Wikipedia administrator that “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

Wikipedia’s goals to have facts backed by sources and to not contain original research are laudable. But sometimes, they go a tad too far (to say the least), a situation I ran into myself when contributing minor edits to entries about certain television series. Original research is one thing, but when prima facie evidence that is available for all to check contradicts a “secondary source”, shouldn’t it be obvious that the secondary source is simply wrong?

The story does have a happy ending, though. Now that Roth published an open letter in The New Yorker, the letter itself qualifies as a “secondary source”, and the Wikipedia entry is now updated. But if anything, this resolution just adds to the Kafkaesque surrealism of the story.

A socialist for president

Economy, Politics No Responses »

Sep 082012

Some interesting plots from Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, courtesy of The New York Times. Compare Obama’s and Bush’s record for private sector employment in the first 40+ months of their respective presidencies (yes, this would mean Bush’s first term, in 2001):

And compare their public sector employment statistics:

So which one, exactly, is the “big government socialist”?

How not to fake an ad

Commerce, Technology No Responses »

Sep 082012

Poor Nokia. The struggling mobile phone manufacturer is about to introduce its new flagship phone, the Lumia 920. The phone supposedly has a high quality camera with image stabilization, which Nokia proudly showed in a YouTube ad. The ad shows a young couple, the geeky man taking videos of her girlfriend while they ride bicycles, go to an amusement park, or just generally goof off.

Except that it’s all a fake. Look closely at this frame, about 27 seconds into the video:

Look at the reflection in the window of that mobile home (or whatever it is). Do you see the girl’s goofy boyfriend, riding his bicycle while holding a phone? Of course not. What you do see is a white van with its side door open, revealing a cameraman with a large, professional camera.

Ouch.

I am actually rooting for Nokia. I even think that Windows 8, while a disaster on the desktop, will likely be a good smartphone or tablet operating system if it is given the chance. None of which excuses the phony ad.

To their credit, Nokia admitted the fake right away, and the updated version of the video that is presently on YouTube says that much. Still…

But then, as P. T. Barnum once supposedly said, any publicity is good publicity. Maybe Nokia will actually benefit from the extra publicity that their commercial receives as a result of this fiasco.

Samsung security breach

Computer Security, Internet No Responses »

Sep 072012

So recently, I got a nice new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S II.

When I set it up, I realized that Samsung chose to replace the built-in Google e-mail application with their own. This was a bit of a disappointment as the Samsung version seemed a tad less flexible and less configurable than the (also pedestrian) Google program, so I opted for the open-source K-9 Mail instead, which works very well indeed.

Today, I noticed that all of a sudden, my server is showing IMAP logins using my user ID from a strange IP address, occurring like clockwork, every five minutes. The IP address belongs to Samsung in Germany, Frankfurt to be precise. This was odd because my phone was actually connected to my home Wi-Fi, so there was no reason for it to go through a distant proxy server. Suspecting that something was afoul, I turned the phone off. The IMAP logins from the German IP address continued.

At this point, I immediately changed all relevant passwords. The login attempts (no longer successful) continued for a while, then stopped.

But what was this? A bit of research showed that the IP addresses are characteristic of Samsung’s “Social Hub” program. Apparently when I entered my login credentials using the Samsung version of the basic e-mail app, it passed on that information to Samsung’s Social Hub servers. So without my knowledge and my approval, my password to my personal account on my Linux server was sent to, and stored on, a server in a foreign country. (And no, I don’t want to hear that I actually gave my approval by clicking the Accept button on a 50-paragraph unreadable user agreement when I started using my phone. This kind of potential security breach must require up-front notification of the user and explicit approval.)

I have since kind of confirmed it by noting that Social Hub indeed shows my e-mail account as being registered, even though I deleted my login credentials days ago from the Samsung e-mail app proper. Worse yet, it seems impossible to delete this account from Social Hub; when I try, I just get a “Loading…” screen that stays on forever.

I still like this phone, but my opinion of Samsung just sank several notches all at once. A high technology company should be much more conscious of its users’ security needs and much more proactive in protecting them. Indeed it leaves me wondering if, perhaps, it might have been possible for a smart hacker to use social engineering and trick Samsung into revealing this information… which Samsung should never have obtained without my explicit permission in the first place.

Farewell to Pioneer

Personal, Physics, Space No Responses »

Sep 062012

Nature had a nice editorial a few days ago about the Pioneer Anomaly and our research, titled “…and farewell to the Pioneer anomaly” (so titled because in the print edition, it is right below the obituary, titled “Farewell to a pioneer”, of Bernard Lovell, builder of what was at the time the world’s largest steerable radio telescope at Jodrell Bank).

Farewell, yes, though I still hope that we will have the wherewithal to publish a longer article in which we provide the details that did not fit onto the pages of Physical Review Letters. We ought to update our review paper in Living Reviews in Relativity, too. We need to prepare for the release of the data used in our analysis. And, if possible, I’d like to spend time tackling some of the open questions we discuss near the end of our last paper, such as analyzing the spin behavior of the two spacecraft or making use of DSN signal strength measurements to improve the trajectory solution.

First things first, though; right now, my priorities are to a) earn money (which means doing things that I actually get paid for, not Pioneer) and b) get ready to have our upstairs bathtub replaced (the workmen will be here Monday morning), after which I plan to do the wall tiles myself (with fingers firmly crossed in the hope that I won’t mess it up too badly.)

Yes, sometimes such mundane things must take priority.

The Hunger Games

Books, Film, Society No Responses »

Sep 042012

Speaking of books… A couple of weeks ago, I received my copy of The Hunger Games on Blu-Ray. I knew more or less what to expect but I was still amazed. I am trying to imagine that conversation somewhere in a movie company boardroom where the producer made the pitch: “I am planning a movie in which two dozen children brutally murder each other…” It’s a near miracle I think that this movie was made, and a genuine miracle that the result was not sweetened up by Hollywood.

The brutality of The Hunger Games is not self-serving. Its dystopia teaches a young audience a lot more than what a first kiss is like or how to survive a life-and-death game with a bow and arrows. It teaches them about choosing and betraying (or be betrayed by) friends. It teaches them about choosing when all your choices are evil and immoral. It teaches them how not to trust any authority. How life can be lethally unfair. How the protected world in which children live is merely an illusion. And the sequels, if possible, are even better. Yes, I now read them all, and I cannot wait to see them come to life on screen.

The Unit

Books, Society 1 Response »

Sep 042012

I just finished reading a chilling Swedish dystopia: The Unit, by Ninni Holmqvist. Its title caught my eye when Google Play on my new tablet offered it at a discount, for only $1.99. I read the first few chapters for free and I was hooked.

The Unit paints a frightening picture of a society in near-future Sweden, in which childless people past childbearing age are sent to state-of-the-art facilities, Reserve Bank Units, to live out the rest of their lives in perfect comfort… as dispensable subjects of medical experiments and organ donors, submissively awaiting the day of their “final donation”.

I just hope that the mentality depicted in this book is not in any way representative of the way people think in present-day Sweden.

TaserDrone

Aviation, Film, Technology No Responses »

Aug 302012

To those friends of mine who think I am nuts when I express my concerns about the inevitable coming of Skynet (from the Terminator movies)… say hello to TaserDrone.

Yes I know, it’s just a proof-of-concept prototype and not a very efficient one at that, but still…

Lost in translation

Food, Hungary, Politics No Responses »

Aug 292012

Rapper Curtis James Jackson III, aka. 50 Cent, was apparently in Hungary a few days ago. While in the country, he must have visited a grocery store, where he took a picture of something that, to him, obviously looked horrendously offensive: a product carrying the name “Negro”, with what appears to be the stylized image of a hanged black man on the plastic bag.

Except that it isn’t. While racism and the rise of the far right are increasingly troubling issues in Hungary, in this case there is a completely innocent explanation. The packaging in question contains candy, throat drops to be precise, made using a nearly century-old secret recipe. And while Negro lozenges are traditionally black in color, the name has nothing to do with the candy’s appearance either: reportedly it is named after its inventor, Italian confectioner Pietro Negro.

And what about the image of a hanged black man? Not exactly. The classic Negro advertising slogan calls the throat drops “the chimney sweep of the throat”. And what may appear as the silhouette of a black man in a noose is, in fact, a chimney sweep doing what chimney sweeps usually do: sweeping a chimney!

In any case, it’s not like it’s hard to find truly offensive product names in Hungary. Like this one:

The Hungarian-language label reads “Negro kiss, vanilla flavored”. But although in this case, the word unambiguously refers to black people, there is again no offensive intent: this is a traditional product name that has been in existence for decades.

First human on the Moon

Space No Responses »

Aug 252012

The first human being ever to walk on the surface of the Moon is no longer with us.

Good bye, Neil Armstrong.

Bradbury Landing

Books, Space No Responses »

Aug 232012

Ray Bradbury would have turned 92 yesterday. Were he still alive, perhaps he would have appreciated this birthday gift: the landing site of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars was just named in his honor.

And Curiosity is now leaving tracks in the Martian dirt at Bradbury Landing.

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