Spinor Info

The end of DRM?

Computers, Intellectual Property No Responses »

Jun 162012

Just as Canada is about to enact its most Draconian copyright law yet (yes, simply watching a foreign DVD using region-free software will make you a criminal) there are signs that the software gaming industry is finally seeing the light. Reportedly Marcin Iwinski, one of the founders of CD Projekt, known for their best selling Witcher game franchise, declared that “we will never use any DRM anymore”. The reason? Witcher 2 was cracked within two hours of its release. Perhaps that in itself is not particularly surprising, but consider this: this game was simultaneously released DRM-free on GOG.COM. But it was the DRM retail version that was cracked in two hours! “What really surprised me is that the pirates didn’t use the GOG version, which was not protected. They took the SecuROM retail version, cracked it,” said Iwinski.

The reality is that DRM only inconveniences legitimate law-abiding customers. You pay for the game, you get a copy crippled with a software component that might break your computer. You download the cracked version from a “warez” site, you get a DRM-free copy. What, pray tell, is the VALUE a legitimate customer gets in exchange for paying good money?

Finally, it seems that at least some in the gaming industry began to ask this very question. Perhaps one day, we may even be able to convince dinosaur politicians…

Cover story

Personal, Physics, Space No Responses »

Jun 152012

Our latest Pioneer paper, in which we discuss the results from the Pioneer thermal model and its incorporation into the orbital analysis (the conclusion being that no significant anomalous acceleration remains once thermal radiation is properly accounted for) made it to the cover of Physical Review Letters. I am very grateful that I was given the opportunity to participate in this research, and I am very proud of this work and our results.

The sceptre of fascism?

Culture, Hungary, Politics No Responses »

Jun 142012

One of Hungary’s greatest poets in the 20th century was Miklós Radnóti. As a Jew, he was conscripted into a forced labor batallion during WW2. He was tragically murdered in late 1944.

Three years prior to his untimely death, Radnóti wrote the following entry in his diary about the then celebrated Transylvanian author József Nyirő:

“The Third Reich once again organized the Weimar Poetry Day on October 31 this year, with participants that included invited poets from eleven Central and Eastern European nations. Hungarian literature was represented on Poetry Day by the Transylvanian author József Nyirő. Nyirő told the UFA, among other things, that: ‘In these days, Europe is experiencing a cultural rebirth. I am glad, literature in Hungary is glad that it can participate in this cultural rebuilding. I just saw a beautiful picture in church a short while ago, in which Luther points at the Bible passage that speaks about us being cleansed by blood. Blood cleanses Europe. The peoples of Europe, united under the sign of peace, spirituality, and the new culture, find one another. With all our hearts, all our souls we wish to take part in this joint enterprise. Long live Adolf Hitler! Long live Germany! Long live the society of German authors!’

“Now, as I copy this news item (Monday morning, November 3) I am left wondering… Is it an accident that I don’t have a single line from him on my shelf? Not even in an antology…”

The sad part? Nyirő is again celebrated in Hungary. As a matter of fact, the mayor of the Csepel district of Budapest is organizing a literary evening tomorrow night, dedicated to the writings of Nyirő. To be held… wait for it… in the Miklós Radnóti cultural center.

I can only think of one word to describe this: Disgusting.

Microsoft MBA

Commerce, Computers, Internet No Responses »

Jun 122012

This graphic was sent to me by its creator with an obvious viral marketing intent; but since it is both funny and informative, I said what the heck, why not? In any case, I just love that photograph of Ballmer on which he looks like a mad 1930s dictator from some wacky computer game (Zork Nemesis comes to mind).

Preferential treatment

Politics, Society No Responses »

Jun 102012

US Congressional representative Mike Rogers, head of the House Homeland Security Transportation Subcommittee, recently suggested that the TSA should not pat down people like Beyonce, who is unlikely to blow a plane up. He said that “There are certain people that are just so well-known that you’ve just got to use your common sense.”

CNN this afternoon asked viewers what they thought of this. The replies they read on air were unanimous: celebrities should not get preferential treatment.

And that, of course, in addition to being just bat crap crazy, also demonstrates what is so wrong with Americans lately. First, this “a rule is a rule is a rule” mentality. It’s as if Americans have become the Germans of the 21st century! Then, completely missing the point about common sense, opting for petty vindictiveness instead. The TSA is not there to “treat” you or anyone else but to filter out potential terrorists. (Now as to whether or not they can actually carry out that task is a topic for another day.) Why on Earth should they be patting down someone who is very well known to them and extremely unlikely to be a threat?

All this once again leaves me wondering who these people south of the border are and what they’ve done with the real Americans I used to know and admire.

More widescreen insanity

Technology, Television No Responses »

Jun 102012

The fun never ends. Here are a few recent screen captures from CBC Newsworld, illustrating how originally widescreen material is letterboxed to a standard definition frame, which is then letterboxed into a widescreen frame, which is then letterboxed into a standard definition frame, which then appears on a widescreen monitor… welcome to the era of postage stamp television images. My favorite is the second one, the screen shot from Prometheus… for some inexplicable reason, they actually further compressed vertically (or stretched horizontally?) an already widescreen image.

Of course marketers knew what they were doing. They knew that most people cannot tell the difference between a resolution of, say, 640×480 vs. 1024×768. So they changed the aspect ratio. And of course they aren’t describing the result as being reduced in height, stunted perhaps; they tell you that it is wider. Wider is good, right?

Click here for the Braille version

Hungary, Society 2 Responses »

Jun 082012

Although my comment is about the Web site of Hungary’s new President, this post has nothing to do with party politics in Hungary. It is about political correctness run amok.

On the President’s new Web site, there is a helpful link for an accessible version of the site, which is of course commendable. What seems somewhat pointless, though, is the presence of a Braille version of the linking text… appearing on a computer screen.

Bradbury dead

Books No Responses »

Jun 062012

The author of the Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and many other classics is no more; Ray Bradbury died today at the age of 91. Maybe one day his ashes will be taken to Mars, where they really belong.

The transit of Venus

Astronomy, Internet, Physics No Responses »

Jun 062012

Yesterday, Venus transited the Sun. It won’t happen again for more than a century.

I had paper “welder’s glasses” courtesy of Sky News. Looking through them, I did indeed see a tiny black speck on the disk of the Sun. However, it was nowhere as impressive as the pictures taken through professional telescopes.

These live pictures were streamed to us courtesy of NASA. One planned broadcast from Alice Springs, Australia, was briefly interrupted. At first, it was thought that a road worker cutting an optical cable was the culprit, but later it turned out to be a case of misconfigured hardware. Or could it be that they were trying to fix a problem with an “intellectual property address”, a wording that appeared on several Australian news sites today? (Note to editors: if you don’t understand the text, don’t be over-eager replacing acronyms with what you think they stand for.)

I also tried to take pictures myself, holding my set of paper welder’s glasses in front of my (decidedly non-professional) cameras. Surprisingly, it was with my cell phone that I was able to take the best picture, but it did not even come close in resolution to what would have been required to see Venus.

The lesson? I think I’ll leave astrophotography to the professionals. Or, at least, to expert amateurs. Unfortunately, I am neither.

That said, I remain utterly fascinated by the experience of staring at a sphere of gas, close to a million and a half kilometers wide, containing 2 nonillion (2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) kilograms of mostly hydrogen gas, burning roughly 580 billion kilograms of it every second in the form of nuclear fusion deep in its core, releasing photons amounting to about 4.3 billion kilograms of energy… and most of these photons remain trapped for a very long time, producing extreme pressures (so that the interior of the Sun is dominated by this ultrarelativistic photon gas) that prevent the Sun from collapsing upon itself, which will indeed be its fate when it can no longer sustain hydrogen fusion in its core a few billion years from now. And then, this huge orb is briefly occulted by a tiny black speck, the shadow of a world as big as our own… just a tiny black dot, too small for my handheld cameras to see.

I sometimes try to use a human-scale analogy when trying to explain to friends just how mind-bogglingly big the solar system is. Imagine a beach ball that is a meter wide. Now suppose you stand about a hundred meters away from it, like the length of a large sports field. Okay… now imagine that that beach ball is so bleeping hot, even at this distance its heat is burning your face. That’s how hot the Sun is.

Now hold up a large pea, about a centimeter in size. That’s the Earth. Another pea, roughly halfway between you and the beach ball would be Venus.

A peppercorn, some thirty centimeters or so from your Earth pea… that’s the Moon. Incidentally, if you hold that peppercorn up, at about thirty centimeters from your eye it is just large enough to obscure the beach ball in the distance, producing a solar eclipse.

Now let’s go a little further. Some half a kilometer from the beach ball you see a large-ish orange… Jupiter. Twice as far, you see a smaller orange with a ribbon around it; that’s Saturn. Pluto would be another peppercorn, more than three kilometers away.

But your beach ball’s influence does not end there. There will be specks of dust in orbit around it as far out as several hundred kilometers, maybe more. So where would the next beach ball be, representing the nearest star? Well, here’s the problem… the surface of the Earth is just not large enough, because the next beach ball would be more than 20,000 kilometers away.

To represent other stars, not to mention the whole of the Milky Way, we would once again need astronomical distance scales. If a star like our Sun was a one meter wide beach ball, the Milky Way of beech balls would be larger than the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. And the nearest full-size galaxy, Andromeda, would need to be located in distant parts of the solar system, far beyond the orbits of planets.

The only way we could reduce galaxies and groups of galaxies to a scale that humans can comprehend is by making stars and planets microscopic. So whereas the size of the solar system can perhaps be grasped by my beach ball and pea analogy, it is simply impossible to imagine simultaneously just how large the Milky Way is, not to mention the entire visible universe.

Or, as Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Wet jubilee

Culture, History, Society No Responses »

Jun 032012

As part of the Queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations, the British did something that hasn’t been done in 350 years: a 1000-boat pageant on the river Thames.

Being the loyalist royalist, I was watching (parts of) it on television. As I did so, I couldn’t help noticing just how soaking wet the choir was on top of the boat carrying the London Philharmonic.

Their spirit was undaunted, though, and they sang beautifully and professionally. I hope none of them caught pneumonia.

The Dragon has come home

Space 1 Response »

May 312012

The Dragon spacecraft of SpaceX corporation successfully splashed down after a successful overall mission of hauling cargo to and from the International Space Station.

It’s an incredible success for a commercial venture.

I also found the appearance of the SpaceX mission control facility revealing. Ordinary office desks, ordinary office chairs, ordinary flat screen monitors. Nothing special, no horrendously expensive custom hardware.

This reinforces my impression that the SpaceX venture actually brought the 21st century to NASA and the ISS. An impression that was created by the ISS crew’s reaction to the Dragon capsule’s “new car smell” and its space-age interior complete with smooth surfaces, blue LEDs and whatnot.

Congrats to SpaceX. Well done. Here is to the future.

Projectile motion

Media, Physics No Responses »

May 292012

A few days ago, a bright 16-year old German student of Indian descent, Shouryya Ray of Dresden, won second prize in a national science competition with an essay entitled “Analytische Lösung von zwei ungelösten fundamentalen Partikeldynamikproblemen” (Analytic solution of two unsolved fundamental particle dynamics problems).

This story should have ended there. And perhaps it would have, were it not for the words in the abstract that said, among other things: “Das zugrundeliegende Kraftgesetz wurde bereits von Newton (17. Jhd.) entdeckt. […] Diese Arbeit setzt sich also die analytische Lösung dieser bisher nur näherungsweise oder numerisch gelösten Probleme zum Ziele.” (The underlying power law was discovered by Newton (17th century). The goal of this work is then the analytic solution of these until now only approximately or numerically solved problems.)

This was more than enough for sensation-seeking science journalists. The story was picked up first by Die Welt with the title “Mit 16 ein Genie: Shouryya Ray löste ein jahrhundertealtes mathematisches Problem” (Genius at 16: Shouryya Ray solves centuries-old mathametical problem) and then translated into English and other languages, even appearing in the Ottawa Citizen. In short order, even a biographical entry on Wikipedia was created; now nominated for deletion, many are voting to keep it because in their view, the press coverage is sufficient to establish encyclopedic notability.

Cooler heads should have prevailed. What science journalists neglected to ask is why, if this is such a breakthrough, the youth only received second prize. And in any case, what on Earth did he actually do? His essay or details about it were not published. The only clue to go by was a press photo in which the student holds up a large sheet of paper containing an equation:

As I discussed this very topic on a page I placed on my Web site a few years back (reacting to some bad math and flawed physics reasoning in an episode of the Mythbusters) I felt compelled to find out more. I guessed (correctly, as it turns out) that \(u\) and \(v\) must be the horizontal and vertical (or vertical and horizontal?) components of the projectile’s velocity, \(g\) is the gravitational constant, and \(\alpha\) is the coefficient of air resistance. However, I am embarrassed to admit that although I spent some time trying, I was not able to find a way to separate the variables and integrate the relevant differential equations to obtain Ray’s formula. I was ready to give up actually when I came across a derivation on reddit (and I realized that I was on the right track all along, I was just stubbornly trying to do a slightly different trick, which didn’t work). The formula is correct, and it is certainly an impressive result for a 16-year old, worthy of a second prize.

But no more. This is not a breakthrough. As it turns out, similar implicit solutions were well known in the 19th century. A formulation that differs from Ray’s only in notational details appeared in a paper by Parker (Am. J. Phys, 45, 7, 606, July 1977). Alas, such an implicit form is of limited utility; one still requires numerical methods to actually solve the equation.

Much of this was probably known to the judges of the competition, which is probably why they awarded the student second prize.

Hopefully none of this will deter young Mr. Ray from pursuing a successful career as a physicist or mathematician.

New car smell

Space 1 Response »

May 262012

According to astronauts on board the ISS, the interior of the SpaceX capsule has a “new car smell“. Seeing the world’s first commercial spacecraft dock with the ISS successfully is, well, awesome I think is an appropriate word here.

On copyright

Canada, Intellectual Property, Politics No Responses »

May 242012

I just wrote an e-mail addressed to all Conservative members of Parliament:

Members of Parliament, Honorable Ministers, Right Honorable Prime Minister:

You are about to vote into law a Bill, C-11, that will declare me a criminal (a criminal!) were I to insert a DVD, legitimately purchased in my native Hungary, into my North American computer and watch it using appropriate software, as said software necessarily breaks a digital lock, namely the region code.

Here is my question: Why are you doing this to us Canadians?

In what Orwellian universe does this serve the interests of our country? Or even, for that matter, those of the Walt Disney Corporation?

Sincerely,

Viktor T. Toth <address and telephone number provided>

PS: I am a former Conservative voter. I am not a political activist (nor am I a “radical extremist”, Mr. Moore), and this desperate last-minute attempt to persuade you is done on my own initiative. Please, do not disrespect me by responding with a stock answer that is just generic propaganda in favor of Bill C-11. While I am quite prepared to receive no answer at all, if you do choose to reply, please address my question directly. Thank you.

Needless to say, I don’t actually expect this e-mail to change anything.

Good-bye Scotty, hello commercial spaceflight

Space, Television No Responses »

May 222012

The Dragon capsule of SpaceX Corporation is on its way after a successful launch towards the International Space Station. If all goes well, it will dock with the ISS in two days’ time, making it the first commercial spacecraft to do so, and paving the way to eventual human flight to the ISS on board commercial vehicles. This really is the beginning of a new era.

And the end of an old one. The ashes of James Doohan, better known as Scotty to Star Trek fans, are reportedly on board the Dragon capsule, to fulfil the actor’s final wishes.

Genetic tests and the Hungarian far right

Biology, Hungary, Politics No Responses »

May 222012

I just read (link in Hungarian) that a far right member of the Hungarian parliament found it necessary to use a genetic test to prove that he is free of Jewish and Roma blood.

Even if it were possible to do so, I have no inclination to use a genetic testing service to find out the ethnicity of my ancestors. But, I do hope that I have Roma, Jewish, Hungarian, Slav, Russian, German, or for that matter Chinese or Indian ancestors. That is because there is only one group of people that I wish to belong to: the group of human beings. I have zero desire to join any subgroup whose sole purpose is to revel in the idea that they are somehow superior by birth to other subgroups. And, well, if all this makes me a mongrel or a tyke in the eyes of some with a better defined ethnicity… you know what, I don’t really like your purebred attitude either.

Windows 8 METRO: Another Microsoft Bob?

Computers, Programming 1 Response »

May 212012

Remember Microsoft Bob? The revolutionary new interface for Windows that was supposed to make everyday computing easier for the unwashed masses?

It was one of Microsoft’s most spectacular product failures, surpassing even the dreadful Clippy (which, after all, was just an unwelcome feature in an otherwise successful product, Office 97).

But now, it seems that Microsoft is determined to do it again. At a time when the operating system is becoming increasingly less relevant to most users (who cares what operating system runs underneath your browser when you access Gmail or Office 365?) they seem to be dead set on alienating that one class of users for whom the operating system still matters: content creators, which includes artists, designers, software developers and the like.

To their credit, Microsoft is doing this in the open, documenting in a very lengthy blog post the basic ideas behind their most controversial design choices.

But the comments are revealing. Here is a random selection (certainly not unbiased) that I found that I could most closely relate to. After all, just like one of the commenters, I, too, “tried Windows 8 for 2 weeks and then uninstalled“… or rather, not so much uninstalled as never looked at the VM again in which it was installed because I just couldn’t care.

So here are those comments:

“Can someone help me out? Should I install Ubuntu, get a Mac, or keep using Windows 7?”

“Your product is named after a feature of your product. And now the new version of your product tries to abandon said feature in its newly introduced usage mode.”

“Google just added windows to Chrome OS. You are removing windows from Windows. This won’t end well.”

“Except for immersive games, I DON’T WANT to run a single full-screen app. Not ever. If I want something to fill the screen, I will maximize the windows.”

“There is a significant disjunction in the UI. when you hit the start button and are whisked into metro land just to search for something, only to come back to the desktop”

“Thank you Microsoft for this complete failure. I for one welcome our new KDE overlords!”

“None of this TABLET CRAP belongs on desktops!”

“The cold, hard truth of the matter is that Microsoft have created an operating system that I feel is OPENLY ANTAGONISTIC to power users, business users, creative professionals and anyone seeking to use their PC as a productivity tool.”

“In WW2 the English started a program to analyze aircraft to figure out where they needed to add armor. They looked at all of the planes coming back and did frequency analysis of where the bullet holes were. Some areas were so riddled that easily 60% of bullet holes hit these key areas. The first reaction is to armor these heavily hit areas of the plane. This is wrong. These planes survived. The armor should go everywhere else.”

“You are killing Aero? You have to be kidding!”

“Windows 8 prognosis for sales: not that good. That is the latest finding from research entity Gartner.”

“I have to give you credit Microsoft, you really do know how to alienate people.”

“The flat UI in no way looks premium. It is harsh, spartan, and an eyesore.”

“The Metro environment severely compromises functionality by:

not allowing real multitasking (only applications in the foreground are allowed to use CPU);
not allowing more than two applications to run in the foreground (all other applications are suspended).
not allowing the two apps in foreground to use half the screen each (most of the time one of the two apps will be unusable because it has too little space to display information).
not allowing the use of more than one display for Metro apps.
not allowing more than one running instance for an Metro app.“

“And the most scary thing is that we already have an example of crippling the Desktop: Windows on ARM/Windows RT. By not allowing third party Desktop applications, the Desktop is only there to allow you to use MS Office.”

“Do you have a logical explanation why you are screaming permanently that these 9.1 percent iPad/iPhone/Android users are more important than 90% desktop users?”

“Pls provide a METRO ON/OFF option in Windows 8 (only desktop). With Mouse&Keyboard, METRO is bizarre to use.”

“How does Windows 8 “metro” and other this teletubby nonsense work on multimonitor setup?”

“It’s a degradation of Windows. New UI is terrible”

“The metro interface is horrible and whoever designed it should go back to work for whatever cell phone company they crawled out of. Lets stop dumbing down the computer for the appliance user.”

“From my perspective, Aero glass is still fresh and new. The loss is ultimately cosmetic and therefore minor, but it adds to one of the bigger issues with Windows 8’s UI”

“Using Windows 8 with a mouse is about as much fun as running Windows Phone 7 in an emulator all day.”

And finally, the last comment that sums up my own feelings neatly:

“If W8 really works on a desktop used by adults I’ll consider it”

But not until then.

Funny graph about the Eurozone

Economy, Politics No Responses »

May 202012

Courtesy of a Google+ friend, I stumbled across this graph, originally from The Atlantic:

What this graph demonstrates is quite simple. Take any random collection of nations. Former member states of the Soviet Union. All the countries along the 5th parallel. Members of a reconstituted Ottoman Empire. Or even countries beginning with the letter “M”. In all cases, the countries you pick turn out to be socioeconomically less diverse (i.e., they have more in common) than the major member states of the European Monetary Union.

I don’t know if it really makes the Eurozone doomed, but it certainly shows that holding it together will be quite a challenge.

Life and art

Art, Canada, Politics No Responses »

May 182012

This is art:

This is life, imitating art:

That in both cases, the subject matter itself is art is just the icing on the cake.

Flawed Big Bang Theory

Television No Responses »

May 152012

“This is it. The Big Bang Theory television show lost all its credibility for me. I could put up with the laugh track (though I cannot understand why they need a laugh track for a realistic drama series) but not with this utter contempt towards elementary logic. Here is what happened: in one episode (S1E15), Dr. Sheldon Cooper tells us that Missy is his fraternal twin sister. But then, in another episode (S3E17), Dr. Cooper purportedly says, “I have a twin sister whose assaults began in utero. If only I’d had the presence of mind to reabsorb her then I’d have a mole with hair on it”. But a real-life Dr. Sheldon Cooper would never make such a mistake: he would know very well that one can only reabsorb an identical twin. This blatant disregard for logic is an insult to the viewers’ intelligence. I am sorry, but this show is unwatchable. Change the channel, please.”

The preceding rant is best delivered, of course, in the voice of Dr. Sheldon Cooper. Fortunately, I am not Sheldon Cooper, and I will still enjoy TBBT when it returns for its next season in the fall. Nor do I have any plans of joining the ranks of nitpickers who demonstrate their presumed intellectual superiority by spending hours watching and re-watching television shows and movies just to find the odd goof. I swear I only noticed this one by accident!

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