Month: May 2008

Net neutrality

Curved bench in Toronto

Today, there is a rally on Parliament Hill in favour of net neutrality. Basically, these people are arguing that internet and telephone companies should not sift through the kind of data their customers are using: designating some for the fast stream and letting some linger or vanish.

In general, I am very supportive of the idea of net neutrality. On the one hand, this is because packet filtering has creepy privacy and surveillance issues associated with it. On the other, it recognizes that established companies will usually do whatever they can to strangle innovative competitors. Without net neutrality, its a fair bet that we would never have had Skype or the World Wide Web.

At the same time, there are legitimate issues about bandwidth. There are people out there exchanging many gigabytes a day worth of movies, music, and games. I am not too concerned with piracy and intellectual property, but that traffic is a real strain on the network and a burden to others. It pushes up costs for everyone as ordinary users subsidize excessive ones.

The best solution seems to be to allow bandwidth capping but disallow packet filtering. That way, sending a terabyte a month of illegally copied films will be restricted, but Skype-like new services will continue to emerge and there will be fewer general opportunites for telecom companies to abuse.

I cannot go to the rally myself, since I will be at work, but I would encourage those who are free and feeling a bit activist to attend.

Climate ethics and uncertainty

Climate Ethics has a thoughtful post up about climate change, scientific uncertainty, and ethics. While not particularly novel, the arguments are well and concisely expressed. Key among them is the basic ethical point Henry Shue has made about revolvers and the heads of others: even if you only have one bullet chambered, pulling the trigger is still an immoral act. It is the possibility of severe harm, rather than the probability of the harmful outcome, that is most ethically relevant.

The uncertainties of climate change are primarily about how bad it will get how quickly, as well as how quickly we need to act to stop it. There is also very strong consensus that the climate can change in ways that would be disastrous for humanity and that present activities materially contribute to the risk of that taking place.

On ethical grounds, it does not seem as though there are any remaining arguments for total inaction in the face of climate change. The question now is the degree to which our moral obligations to future generations compel us to make massive and rapid changes in our lives.

Multiple anagramming

Emily Horn in a heap of clothes

The process of cryptanalysis can be greatly simplified if one possesses more than one message encrypted with the same key. One especially important technique is multiple anagramming. Indeed, it may be the only way to decipher two or more messages that have been enciphered using a one time pad.

The basic idea of multiple anagramming is that you can use one message to guess what possible keys might be, then use another message to check whether it might be correct. For instance, imagine we have these two messages and think they were enciphered using the Vigenere cipher:

SGEBVYAUZUYKRQLBCGKEFONNKNSMFRHULSQ
TUEEDAKHNVKUEOICHKIEPOHRIFDQSPHGEGQ

Now, suppose we think the first message might be addressed to Derek, Sarah, or Steve.

Using words we think the message might start with, we can guess at a key. If the first word is DEREK, the key would start with ‘PCNXL’. If the first word is SARAH, the key would start with ‘AGNBO’. Finally, if the first word is STEVE, the key would start with ‘ANAGR’. Here, the key is a bit of a clue. Normally, there would be no easy way to tell from one message whether we had found the correct key or not.

We can then test those keys against the second message. The first key yields ‘ESRHS’ for the first five letters. The second, ‘TORDP’. The third yields ‘THEYM’. The third looks the most promising. Through either guessing or testing further letters, we can discover that the key is ‘ANAGRAM’. The second message is thus ‘THEYMAYHAVEDECIPHEREDOURCODESCHANGE.’ Having two ciphertexts that produce sensible plaintexts from the same key suggests that we have properly identified the cipher and key being used. We can then easily decipher any other messages based on the same combination.

Accuracy in films

The Russian Communist Party is protesting the new Indiana Jones film, arguing that teenagers will assume it to be historically accurate and thus become confused about the history of the Cold War. St Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich has said that: “It’s rubbish… In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the US.”

Of course, this is all reminiscent of the open letter from Neo-Nazi groups to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in 1981, asserting that absolutely no Nazis were killed by ghosts that flew out of the Ark of the Covenant. Similarly, they argued in 1989 that the depiction of an officer of the Third Reich being turned into a skeleton after drinking from a false Holy Grail would give a misleading historical impression to the world’s movie-watching youth.

Also in the tradition were the many complaints Baz Luhrmann received about Moulin Rouge: for instance, how much of the pop music portrayed was not written until seventy years or so after the period in question.

Tundra dangers

Toronto Graffiti

One of the biggest climatic dangers out there is that warming in the Arctic will melt the permafrost. The tundra is heavily laden with methane – a potent greenhouse gas. In total, the ten million square kilometres contain about 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon (3,670 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide). The permafrost contains more carbon dioxide equivalent than the entire atmosphere at present.

If even a fraction of a percent of that gets released every year, it would blow our carbon budget. Even with enormous cuts in human emissions, the planet would keep on warming. Right now, humanity is emitting about 8 gigatonnes of carbon a year, on track to hit 11 gigatonnes by 2020. If we were to stabilize at that level, emitting 11 gigatonnes a year until 2100, the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will surpass 1,000 parts per million, creating the certainty of a vastly transformed world and a very strong possibility of the end of human civilization.

As such, it is vital to stop climate change before the planet warms sufficiently to start melting permafrost. This is especially challenging given that warming in the Arctic is more pronounced than warming elsewhere. There is also the additional challenge of the sea-ice feedback loop, wherein the replacement of reflective ice with absorptive water increases warming.

The actions necessary to prevent that are eminently possible. Unfortunately, people have not yet developed the will to implement them to anything like the degree necessary. Hopefully, the ongoing UNFCCC process for producing a Kyoto successor will help set us along that path before it becomes fantastically more difficult and expensive to act.

[Update: 4 February 2009] Here is a post on the danger of self-amplifying, runaway climate change: Is runaway climate change possible? Hansen’s take.

[Update: 19 February 2010] See also: The threat from methane in the North.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I was feeling kind of down as I went in to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but that situation could not persist. Every scene challenges your mind with something even more ludicrous: whether it is non-sensical plot points, egregious physics, or absurdly over-the-top scenarios. It is no exaggeration to call the plot incoherent and trivial, and most of the acting wooden. Indiana’s James Deanish young foil is particularly flat and uninteresting. This is no thinking man’s film; nor is it one for the DVD library.

That being said, the film does a good job of redeeming itself as a piece of entertainment. It may feel like an awkward, alien-obsessed re-imagining of the original trilogy, but there is still some humour and charm. The main appeal of the film is that it provides you with ample fodder for internal joking criticism, as well as plenty of mindless sequences in which to mull it over.

One side note on the graphics: for some reason, the set design, lighting, and computer graphics were all strongly reminiscent of the Harry Potter films. Both the indoor sequences and the outdoor shots had the same distinctive feeling, less cartoonish than untextured early computer graphics, but still inescapably false.

[Update: 12:53am] Emily has also written a review.

Historical emissions and adaptation costs

Emily at a coffee shop in Kensington Market, Toronto

It is widely acknowledged that developing countries will suffer a great deal from climate change. They are vulnerable to effects like rising sea levels and increased frequency and severity of extreme weather. They also have more limited means available to respond, as well as other serious problems to deal with. Providing adaptation funding is therefore seen as an important means of getting them on-side for climate change mitigation. It could be offered as an incentive to cut emissions.

That being said, there is a strong case to be made that developing countries should not need to do anything in exchange for adaptation funding. Making them do so is essentially akin to injuring someone, then demanding something in return for the damages they win against you in court. The historical emissions of developed states have primarily induced the climate change problem; as such, developing states suffering from its effects have a right to demand compensation.

Very roughly, the developed world as a whole is responsible for about 70% of emissions to date. The United States has produced about 22% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere; Western Europe is responsible for about 17%; Canada represents something like 2% of the total. It can be argued that – by rights – states like Bangladesh and Ghana should be dividing their total costs for adaptation and sending the bill to other states, on the basis of historical emissions.

That being said, it is only fair to say that developed states are only culpable for a portion of their total emissions, on account of how the science of climate change was not well understood until fairly recently. Exactly where to draw the line is unclear, but that doesn’t especially matter since developing states simply don’t have the power to demand adaptation transfers on the basis of past harms. States that developed through the extensive use of fossil fuels will continue to use the influence they acquired through that course of military and economic strengthening to make others bear most of the costs for their pollution.

New Canadian emission data

Canadian emissions 1990-2006

The Canadian government has published the official National Inventory Report: Greenhouse Gas Sources and Sinks in Canada for 1990 to 2006. Emissions in 1990 were 592 megatonnes (Mt). By 2000, they were 718 Mt. Here are the most recent figures:

  • 2003: 741 Mt
  • 2004: 743 Mt
  • 2005: 734 Mt
  • 2006: 721 Mt

Maintain and deepen that downward trend and we might just do our part in sorting out this unprecedented problem. Moving to a low-carbon global society would be quite a human achievement – even more so if we can also transition from fuels that are running out to those that never will.