The world’s population is expected to reach the magic number of 7 billion today. Trick or treat!
Federal government debt in the United States is expected to reach 100% of the country’s GDP today. Trick or treat!
Meanwhile, an almost unheard of October Nor’easter dumped over 30 inches of snow in some places in New England, leaving millions without power, thousands stranded in grounded airplanes or stuck trains, and a few people dead. Trick or treat!
Candy, anyone?
Once again I am noticing that Facebook fails to pick up my blog entries. If I reset the link, it collects all recent posts (and displays the last one twice, for some reason, on my “Wall”) but then it stops collecting them again. Weird. Of course it’s probably nothing personal, just an uncorrected bug in Facebook’s RSS harvesting code.
I’ve been skeptical about the validity of the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino result, but I’ve been equally skeptical about some of the naive attempts to explain it. Case in question: in recent days, a supposed explanation (updated here) has been widely reported in the popular press, and it had to do with a basic omission concerning the relativistic motion of GPS satellites. An omission that almost certainly did not take place… after all, experimentalists aren’t idiots. (That said, they may have missed a subtle statistical effect, such as a small difference in beam composition between the leading and trailing edges of a pulse. In any case, the neutrino spectrum should have been altered by Cherenkov-type radiation through neutral current weak interactions.)
I’ve been using WordPress for this blog for the last several years. Lately, I noticed a problem: every new post I add appears in the “Uncategorized” post category, and it is impossible to remove a post from a category.
I’m sure the good folks at WordPress will fix this problem soon, but until then, here are the SQL statements I need to remove all posts from the “Uncategorized” category:
DELETE vttoth_term_relationships FROM vttoth_term_relationships, vttoth_posts WHERE term_taxonomy_id=1 AND object_id=ID AND post_type='post'; UPDATE vttoth_term_taxonomy SET count=0 WHERE term_taxonomy_id=1;
My WordPress database is called ‘vttoth’; for a WordPress database that uses a different name, the above instructions must be altered accordingly.
Years ago, I expressed my (informed, I hope) skepticism concerning climate change in the form of several questions. One of these questions has been answered in a very resounding way by a most thorough independent analysis: yes, the warming trend is real and statistically significant.
So then, my questions are:
√ Is global warming real?
• Is it a future trend?
• Is it man-made (caused by CO2 emissions)?
• Is it bad for us?
The fundamental dilemma is that on the one hand, it seems irresponsible to advocate the spending of trillions of dollars (and potentially wrecking an already fragile global economy) before all these questions are answered. On the other hand, by the time we have all the answers, it may be too late to act.
But then, perhaps none of it matters. I do not believe that harebrained schemes like carbon trading are ever going to work. Humanity will continue to burn fossil fuels in ever increasing quantities in the foreseeable future, and atmospheric CO2 will inevitably increase. Ultimately, we may be faced with choices such as geoengineering or simple adaptation: moving from coastal lands to higher ground, evacuating areas that become unsurvivable in the summer, but also taking advantage of longer growing seasons or more fertile areas in the north.
I don’t usually join politically motivated movements on a whim, but this time I made an exception: the mission statement of the newly established Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter is one with which I find myself in complete agreement. I just worry that this and other acts are really too little, too late…
Courtesy of IEEE Spectrum, we can read an English translation of the now vanished blog of a Japanese robot operator working at Fukushima.
I’m reinstalling Windows 7 on my main computer. I am doing an Upgrade (upgrading Windows 7 with itself) to avoid having to reinstall everything else. This is kind of a last resort solution, to deal with a problem that defeated all my previous attempts to fix, including some machine code level debugging. I hope the reinstall will do the trick. I’ll know in a few hours.
Recently, Facebook stopped importing entries from my blog again. I can set up the import, Facebook imports all fresh entries (and for some reason, shows the most recent one in duplicate) but then it never imports anything again. I don’t think it’s anything wrong on my end, but it sure is annoying.
While the world mourns Steve Jobs, another computing pioneer, Dennis Ritchie, died. Our world wouldn’t be the same without UNIX or the C programming language. My own life would have been very different without him. Jobs will long be forgotten when Ritchie’s legacy will still live on, decades from now.
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("goodbye, dennis\n");
}
Yesterday, I watched Terminator Salvation, the latest movie in the Terminator franchise.
Today, I am reading in the news about an attempt to reconstruct visual images from MRI brain scans.
I am also reading about US military drones hacked by a virus of unknown origin and purpose.
All of which makes me wonder just how close we are actually to the kind of dystopian future depicted by the Terminator movies.
And he was only 56. I was never much of an Apple fan, but Jobs was undeniably a towering giant of the personal computer era.
Once again, our beloved conservative government is trying to turn me into a criminal for simply copying all my (legally purchased) Blu-Ray and DVD movies to a hard drive for convenience. In fact, the proposed law very specifically makes it clear that reproduction for private purposes is legal only if “the individual, in order to make the reproduction, did not circumvent, as defined in section 41, a technological protection measure, as defined in that section, or cause one to be circumvented”.
Looks like I will be a lawbreaker. Or worse, I am a radical extremist, according to our beloved government’s heritage minister.
Meanwhile, the score is Disney: 1, people of Canada: 0, courtesy of the Conservative Party.
Message to Stephen Harper: let me know when you came back to your senses so that I can vote conservative again.
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately.
Many of my friends asked me about the faster-than-light neutrino announcement from CERN. I must say I am skeptical. One reason why I am skeptical is that no faster-than-light effect was observed in the case of supernova 1987A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud some 170,000 light years from here. Had there been such an effect of the magnitude supposedly observed at CERN, neutrinos from this supernova would have arrived years before visible light, but that was not the case. Yes, there are ways to explain away this (the neutrinos in question have rather different energy levels) but these explanations are not necessarily very convincing.
Another reason, however, is that faster-than-light neutrinos would be eminently usable in a technological sense; if it is possible to emit and observe them, it is almost trivial to build a machine that sends a signal in a closed timelike loop, effectively allowing us to send information from the future to the present. In other words, future me should be able to send present me a signal, preferably with the blueprints for the time machine of course (why do all that hard work if I can get the blueprints from future me for free?) So, I said, if faster-than-light neutrinos exist, then future me should contact present me in three…, two…, one…, now! Hmmm… no contact. No faster-than-light neutrinos, then.
But that’s when I suddenly remembered an uncanny occurrence that happened to me just hours earlier, yesterday morning. We ran out of bread, and we were also out of the little mandarin or clementine oranges that I like to have with my breakfast. So I took a walk, visiting our favorite Portuguese bakery on Nelson street, with a detour to the nearby Loblaws supermarket. On my way, I walked across a small parking lot, where I suddenly spotted something: a mandarin orange on the ground. I picked it up… it seemed fresh and completely undamaged. Precisely what I was going out for. Was it just a coincidence? Or perhaps future me was trying to send a subtle signal to present me about the feasibility of time machines?
If it’s the latter, maybe future me watched too much Doctor Who, too. Next time, just send those blueprints.
I’m back from a week-long trip to Hungary. We had our 30-year high school reunion last Saturday; it was very enjoyable. All in all, everything went well, so well in fact that it leaves me worried; am I missing something?
Now is the time to panic! At least this was the message I got from CNN yesterday, when it announced the breaking news: an explosion occurred at a French nuclear facility.
I decided to wait for the more sobering details. I didn’t have to wait long, thanks to Nature (the science journal, not mother Nature). They kindly informed me that “[…] the facility has been in operation since 1999. It melts down lightly-irradiated scrap metal […] It also incinerates low-level waste” and, most importantly, that “The review indicates that the specific activity of the waste over a ten-year period is 200×109 Becquerels. For comparison, that’s less than a millionth the radioactivity estimated to have been released by Fukushima […]”
Just to be clear, this is not the amount of radioactivity released by the French site in this accident. This is the total amount of radioactivity processed by this site in 12 years. No radioactivity was released by the accident yesterday.
These facts did not prevent the inevitable: according to Nature, “[t]he local paper Midi Libre is already reporting that several green groups are criticizing the response to the accident.” These must be the same green groups that just won’t be content until we all climbed back up the trees and stopped farting.
Since I mentioned facts, here are two more numbers:
All fear nuclear power! Panic now!
The other day, I bought some new undershirts. It was my wife who noticed something on the label that escaped my attention: Made in Canada/Fabrique au Canada. It has been so long since I last saw such a label, I almost forgot what it looks like. The undershirts were made by Stanfields, in Nova Scotia.
I also got two books from my wife. They were both printed in the USA. What can I say… neat.
It has been a while since I did anything in machine language. Until this past weekend, that is, when I spent a fair bit of time starting at disassembled code with a debugger.
Last week, I upgraded my Sony Ericsson smartphone to the latest version of its operating system. The upgrade process failed on my main computer when, after updated USB drivers for the phone were downloaded, they failed to install. The problem was not specific to the phone: all driver installations failed, with a not very informative code (0xC0000142, which just means that the application failed to initialize.)
Using the very helpful ProcMon utility from sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft) I managed to identify that it was a process named drvinst.exe that failed. This process is invoked automatically by the system every time a USB device is inserted, and also during device driver installations. So why did it fail?
I downloaded the latest Windows debugger (windbg.exe) from Microsoft; this debugger allows me to do things like debug child processes spawned by a parent process. (I later learned that drvinst.exe actually has a feature whereas it waits for a debugger after startup, to help with driver installation debugging; but chances are that I would not have been able to make much use of this feature, as the failure occurred before drvinst.exe actually started to execute its own code.) I attached the debugger to the DCOM service process (which is the one that spawns copies of drvinst.exe.) I was able to determine that it was during the initial process setup stage that this process failed, when it was attempting to attach to the gdi32.dll system library.
I still have no idea why this happens. But with the help of the debugger, I was able to tinker with this process, changing a processor register’s value at just the right spot, allowing it to continue. This inconvenient but workable process allowed me to install drivers for my phone and also updated drivers for my wireless mouse from Microsoft Update.
Perhaps the most incomprehensible bit is that the same thing works fine on an essentially identical computer. The actual failure occurs inside a kernel subroutine (undocumented system call 123Ah, called from GdiDllInitialize in gdi32.dll) that I cannot debug without a kernel debugger (and since I am trying not to mess my machine up too much, I opted not to do kernel debugging). That subroutine does not appear to be doing anything particularly magical. I checked and all relevant files and Registry settings are identical on the two machines. So it remains a mystery for now… nonetheless, it was educational. I learned a lot about driver installation in Windows 7, about process startup, and incidentally, about the ReactOS project whose open source equivalents to the relevant system components helped me a great deal to understand what was going on.
I am reading an article in Science about the efforts of people like planetary scientist David Morrison to allay fears concerning a prophesied collision between the Earth and the mythical planet Nibiru. Apparently, some folks are taking this pseudoscientific hogwash so seriously, they are even contemplating suicide. Good people like Morrison are trying to talk sense into them.
Perhaps they shouldn’t. Here is my message: go ahead, kill yourself. That means that for the rest of us, 2013 will be a happier year, because fewer idiots will roam the Earth.
But just to demonstrate that I am not all arrogant and cruel, here’s another option: you can always choose to come to your senses before December 21, 2012, realize that stuff in Hollywood movies should not be confused with real life, and go on living.
I never thought Apple computers were hip. Every so often, I thought about buying Apple hardware, but if I did so, I’d want a development system, so my shopping cart at apple.ca rapidly ballooned to some 2,000 dollars… by which time I inevitably realized that I’d be buying expensive toys that would become obsolete long before I’d find the time needed to become proficient with Apple’s development tools.
And now here is an interesting article, from the Ottawa Citizen no less, elaborating on something that I felt all along: that despite its hip image, what Apple sold to the masses all along was really mediocrity.
Of course this probably means that I am not one of the cool kids, but if that is the case, so be it… life is way too short to worry about coolness.