Year: 2006

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it

Umbrella

Make, a community of tinkerers and open-source affectionados, has published a list of gift suggestions. Some of their projects look really cool. Among them:

They are also selling a neat Leatherman warranty voider, in case you know a geek that does not yet have a multi-tool. (I have two: a Swisstool X and a little SOG Crosscut on my keychain). Their philosophy of “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” is increasingly relevant in a world where manufacturers are allowing fewer and fewer things to be done by those who purchase their products.

I have long been a huge fan of open source software. The blog runs on Redhat Linux, using Apache Server, and both WordPress and MediaWiki are open source projects. All of these pieces of software can be used for free, even more usually, your right to take them apart and rebuild is limited only by your creativity. Wikipedia is probably the best website ever created, and it is all about collective effort and shared information.

Pre-reading for Turkey

In preparation for the trip to Turkey, I have moved on from V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life to the copy of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red that my mother sent as a birthday gift. Somewhat surprisingly, I find that I get more non-fiction reading done when I intersperse it with chapters from good fiction. It lets you take a break while remaining in a reading mode, and achieve a bit more balance without compromising your ability to get things done.

Written from the perspective of someone who has died violently, but remained capable of immortal communication, the beginning reminds me a bit of Orson Scott Card’s macabre short story “Memories of my Head.” There is an interesting contrast in literature between those who have passed through death to be uncaring about worldly things and those, like this narrator, who remain concerned with matters like wealth and revenge. The most sensible view has always seemed to be that expressed in Emily Brontë’s “Song.” It is a great shame that she herself died so young.

Academically, I have mostly been reading for the seminar this Thursday. Interesting as they have been, it will be a great relief to have the weekly effort they require ended, allowing greater opportunity to focus on the thesis.

Birthday party concluded

Kai and Jessica

My thanks to those who attended the party last night. It was great fun, with lots of good music and conversation. Particular thanks to Alex and Bryony, for correcting my lack of an Oxford academic robe (I had been borrowing Kai’s for high table dinners), Kai for Simpsons magnets and a history of Pitt the Elder, and to Emily for an Albert Einstein action figure. I think I will make him sit atop my stack of thesis books. In the vicinity of Popper and Kuhn, he will look especially appropriate.

Contrary to my fears that the birthday party would be as poorly attended as the Canada Day party, quite a good number of people showed up. That is particularly appreciated, given how busy the end of term is for everyone. Things ended exceptionally late, and in circumstances not comprehensively remembered – generally the marks of a successful student party.

It’s exciting that there are now just three days left before my father will be visiting Oxford, and a just a week before we are leaving for Turkey. Now, to get back to thesis and seminar work.

First published photograph

Costumed people dancing, Queer Bop, Wadham College, Oxford

On page 3 of the 23 November 2006 issue of The Oxford Student, there is an article by Kate McMullen on the Wadham Queer Bop. Specifically, it describes a homophobic attack being investigated by the police. Accompanying it is a photo that I took at last year’s bop and posted on my blog. The same image is on Facebook. It doesn’t suit the headline very well, and it wasn’t taken at this year’s bop, but it seems like such issues are not of major concern to the editorial staff at The Oxford Student.

It would have been nice for them to have asked me, prior to using it, or at least given me some accreditation. I have sent a short and friendly letter to the editor:

Sir,

I was surprised to see – on the third page of your November 23rd issue – a photo that I took at last year’s Queer Bop and subsequently posted to my website (www.sindark.com). Next time, please let me know that you are planning to print one of my photos, and I will send you a higher resolution copy.

Thanks,

Milan Ilnyckyj
Wadham College, Oxford

That said, it is good to know that I have taken at least one photo that is worth blowing up and putting in a newspaper. The official student newspaper of Oxford might also be considered a cut above your standard such offering.

[Update: 9:30pm] As Sarah quite correctly pointed out, my focus on the photo issue completely missed the broader concerns raised by the story itself. A homophobic assault taking place within an Oxford college should definitely result in a comprehensive investigation and the punishment of those implicated to the fullest extent of the law.

[Update: 27 November 2006] I sent a message to the Oxford Student asking them to do three things in order to amicably resolve the above situation: print the letter to the editor above, credit me for the photo in the web version of the story, and formally state that they will not use materials from my websites without prior permission in the future. I have received the following response and, pending the printing of the letter above, will consider the matter formally and amicably settled:

Dear Milan,

Thanks for your message. Apologies for the unattributed use of your Queer Bop photo. I’ve forwarded your message on to the relevant news editors (Kate McMullen had nothing to do with the photo). btw, it’s a fantastic photo and really makes the page look great. The issue it appeared in was the last one of term, so your letter cant be printed in the paper until next term.

Statement: We will not use photography or other content from webpages that you operate in the future, without prior written permission.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Cookson
[Editor in Chief]

As I said in the past, I am quite happy to have my photos used in newspapers and other publications, provided that a request is received in advance and proper attribution is given.

Old v. new economy

Google, a company with 9,378 employees, now has a stockmarket capitalization of $155 billion: about $16.5 million a person. General Motors has about 326,999 employees and a stockmarket capitalization of about $19 billion: about $58,000 a person.

It is impossible for me to believe that Google has enough good ideas to justify such a huge amount of capital per employee. That said, they did earn $1.47 billion in 2005, compared to a loss of more than $10 billion at GM. Also, everybody has known for years that GM’s pension and health care obligations are going to bury the company, barring some massive default.

Nuclear fusion as a power source

Staircase in New College

At dinner, this evening, I was speaking with one of the Wadham College fellows about nuclear fusion. He highlighted an element that I hadn’t previously heard discussed: namely the fact that you need to build truly enormous reactors so as to have a surface area to volume ratio low enough that fusion can be sustained. He spoke of the possibility that two or three gargantuan power plants could serve areas as vast as Europe or North America, but that enormous technical hurdles remain, most of them relating to plasma control.

Remember that, once atoms form a plasma, they have been stripped of their electrons. As such, the positive charges of all protons cause them to repel one another with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Imagine trying to push the north poles of two powerful bar magnets together, and you will begin to appreciate the kind of force dynamics at work. For fusion to be attained, that repulsion needs to be overcome. In the kind of reactors being experimentally constructed now, that is generally achieved through containment using extremely powerful electromagnets.

Under construction now, in France, is the International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor (ITER). Construction will finish around 2016 and the device will hopefully provide the information and experience required to develop fusion reactors commercially. If they could be deployed, they would offer the benefits of existing fission plants (reliable and substantial electrical generation), with relatively few issues relating to radiactivity (though, as the fellow pointed out, the gamma rays generated in hydrogen fusion would cause the reactors themselves to become quite radioactive, over time).

The possibility of a deus ex machina stepping in to deal with energy security and climate change is certainly an alluring one. With enough power, it would be possible to produce as much hydrogen as you could desire from water. If gargantuan plants are the mechanism to make fusion feasible, energy from them could be partially distributed in that way. Even if fusion were not a panacea, it could be an important component in a response that also includes conservation, the development of renewables, and technical mechanisms to make fossil fuel use carbon neutral.

I don’t know nearly enough about nuclear physics to be able to comment on the viability of fusion as a power source. One thing you hear constantly in journalistic coverage of it is that it has been twenty years or so off for ages now. Hopefully, with the lessons learned from ITER, it will be a real twenty years this time. If that did come to pass, it would certainly not be too soon. On a political note, it is probably a good thing it is being built in France. When it (inevitably) goes way over-budget, the government is reasonably unlikely to scrap the project. By way of comparison, recall how the US government cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, after the expected cost tripled to US$12 billion.

Living with low light

For those interested in digital photography, you can find a good set of very comprehensible suggestions on the Lens & Shutter website. Judging by the photos you see on Facebook, I would say that the one on flash use is the most essential piece of reading for most amateur digital photographers. As highlighted in Philip Greenspun’s good free tutorial, awareness of light is critical to all good photography.

Reading about photography frequently makes me miss my tripod, which is back in Vancouver. (It makes a cameo in a relatively bad photo of Astrid.) I should get a little one so that I can actually aim my camera when I use it in timer mode on a solid surface, rather than just shooting straight up or at whatever angle the surface allows.

PS. Despite my love of wide angle, and hence aversion to digital SLRs with small sensors, my heart is definitely softening towards something like the Rebel XTi. That said, my dSLR fund is only worth about 36% of the price of that kit, and seems unlikely to expand prior to my departure from Oxford.

Perspective

The following is simply plagiarized, from Carl Sagan, but it is nonetheless quite important. Back in my insomniac elementary school days (as opposed to my insomniac graduate school days), I remember reading quite a number of his books. The non-fiction ones tended to be particularly interesting and well illustrated. These specific observations of his have always struck me as especially poignant:

The Earth from deep space

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

This is an expression that I expect would be inspiring, humbling, and amazing for any human being.

Cognitive boundaries

Eye Boss, in a Link to the Past

Sometimes, I wonder whether I should be disturbed that there are dozens of video games I know by heart. I mean that, after not playing them for five years or more, I know exactly which block needs to be pushed, what sequence of answers needs to be given in a run of questioning. The situation is altogether uncanny: you see the little girl made of thirty pixels and you know the instant you see her that she will ask you about her cat: this in a game that you last played in your friend’s basement when you had never had a sip of beer or wine and didn’t know what continent Oxford was on. It is like some kind of insane mockery of my inability to remember the three or four main points in the forty page article that I just read.

Human brains have not evolved for this ‘unknown person 31’ said ‘position 16/34’ on ‘topic 8041D’ style of interaction with data. I would venture to say that we are better suited to the ‘if it flashes, hit it with that weapon more’ style of interaction with data.

Wiki restriction in progress

The wiki came under discussion in today’s seminar. As such, it is offline until such a time as I can come up with a robust way to restrict access to seminar notes, while leaving all the material that I have been producing myself available.

Ideally, I would like to either make specific pages of the wiki require a password to access or, alternatively, restrict certain pages to specific user accounts. If anyone knows how to do this elegantly, please let me know.

I expect that I should have my portions available again by Monday. If you care to report any bugs on the blog between now and then, feel free to do so as a comment to this post.

[Update: 4:30pm] Much more quickly than expected, I have been able to establish a content management system for the wiki that allows certain pages to be restricted from public access. This treatment has now been applied to seminar notes from the thesis seminar and the Developing World seminar. It has not been applied to my reading notes, notes related to public lectures, or other such pages. As with any such change (one that requires me to edit PHP script and MySQL database settings), please report any bugs that you encounter.

Once again, I must say that I am impressed with MediaWiki as a platform. All I did was backup the MySQL database and the /images/ folder, erase the old install (except for LocalSettings.php), install a patched version of MediaWiki, run the installer, throw out the config file it generated, add the restriction patch code to the old config file, and then configure user accounts to have access to restriction features. That may sound very tricky to a lot of people, but it was actually a breeze. The whole thing was done in half an hour, with no hiccups discovered so far. Now that it is publicly known, the Lecture and Seminar Notes section of the wiki has graduated out of the experimental grouping.