Month: November 2010

Checklists and checklists

This will be the million-chore weekend. I have been building up lists of increasingly urgent tasks for weeks. This Saturday and Sunday, my focus will be on pushing those lists back down to a sensible size. I have clothes to repair; several C.V. variants to generate; receipts to sort and transmit; books to finish and review; notes to transfer; appointments to make; backups to update; drives to move; lists to update; software to install and update; endless emails requiring response; a donation to make; numerous articles to read; letters to write; websites to alter and update; RAW files to sort through and file; and probably more to do that I have temporarily forgotten.

It is unfortunate that this is also a jackhammering weekend, for one of the houses behind mine.

Some of the chores are blog-focused, and there may be some downtime associated with them.

Rail electrification and power transmission

Over on The Oil Drum there is an interesting article up on rail electrification in the United States, as a way to reduce the risks associated with climate change and the possibility of peak oil.

There are some appealing synergies that could be associated with electrified rail: in particular, the possibility of combining electric rail infrastructure with electrical transmission infrastructure. That could allow renewable projects in remote areas to be linked to the grid, as well as help with inter-regional load balancing. The more different kinds of renewable power you can combine, the easier it is to deal with intermittency. The same is true for using renewable energy sources from across a broader geographic area.

Ottawa solar power workshops

Ottawa may not be the most efficient place in the world to install solar panels, but locals trying to get off the grid may want to attend one of the solar energy information sessions recently mentioned on Apt613.

This is your chance to personally benefit from the feed-in tariffs in the Ontario Green Energy Act. That said, unless your house is already very efficiently insulated, making those improvements will probably do more for the climate per dollar invested than putting some solar panels up.

Six Easy Pieces

In 1964, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman gave a series of introductory lectures on physics to undergraduate students at CalTech. Six Easy Pieces is an abbreviated version, with six chapters on the essential elements of modern physics including atomic theory, conservation of energy, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and the relation of physics to other sciences.

The lectures highlight Feynman’s particular style, in that they are engaging and accessible. The book contains hardly any mathematics and – aside from one dated and strangely detailed departure into categorizing elementary particles – everything in the book should be reasonably accessible to anyone with a passing knowledge of science. At many points, Feynman identifies things that were unknown to science in 1964. Contemporary readers may find themselves wondering how much has changed in the intervening time. Indeed, it would probably be a valuable exercise for somebody to write an update. Ideally, a talented science writer like Simon Singh who could bring a talent in expression to the update that would mirror that in the individual.

Feynman does accord some space to more philosophical issues, such as defining ‘science’. He repeatedly asserts that: “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth” and uses that criterion to distinguish it from other kinds of knowledge, including mathematics.

The best thing about the book may be some of the elegant ways in which Feynman explains fundamental truths about the universe, and how they relate to each other. He doesn’t simply assert things like the nature of gravitational attraction or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but in many cases illustrates how they arise from other pieces of known physics. For instance, Feynman elegantly explains how Kepler’s Laws on planetary motion can be elaborated into Newton’s universal theory of gravitation.

Finland’s nuclear waste dump

This is interesting: Finland is building a radioactive waste dump meant to store the stuff safely for at least 100,000 years. They are in the process of building a new nuclear reactor and – rather admirably – their law requires that the waste be dealt with domestically, rather than exported.

I have argued previously that I would feel more comfortable with the construction of new nuclear plants in Canada if the utilities building them also had to build adequate waste storage facilities before the power plants became operational.

The Warrior’s Honour

It is strange to read Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour now, when he is leader of the official opposition rather than a journalist. Back in 1998, Ignatieff described the purpose of the book:

I wanted to find out what mixture of moral solidarity and hubris led Western nations to embark on this brief adventure in putting the world right.

Ignatieff is making reference to the whole notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ which emerged strongly after the scale of both killing and western inaction in the 1994 Rwandan genocide became apparent. The book is certainly dated in some ways, which can be a liability. At the same time, it has value insofar as it does express one perspective of that time, and facilitates consideration of what has changed since.

The central concept of Ignatieff’s book is the ethics of warriors themselves – the internal moral forces that sometimes help to constrain behaviour within the most limited bounds of ethics, even in wartime. He explores the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as special representatives (‘enforcers’ is too strong a word) of the Geneva Conventions. He explains how Henry Dunant – founder of the organization – established a continuing tradition in which delegates of the ICRC have “made their pact with the devil of war” and “accept[ed] the inevitability, sometimes even the desirability of war” while “trying, if it is possible, to conduct it according to certain rules of honour.” Ignatieff also describes the consequences when warriors abandon honour, as he alleges took place during and after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when former neighbours destroyed their collective homeland driven by “the narcissism of minor difference.”

The Warrior’s Honour is not an especially practical book. The tone is more mournful and ambiguous than certain or persuasive. It doesn’t offer much guidance to those trying to decide how to respond to the humanitarian emergencies of today. Ignatieff’s book does more to describe the predicament than to suggest paths out of it, though that is a valuable undertaking in itself. In the conclusion, he explains:

The chief moral obstacle in the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge – morally considered – is the desire to keep faith with the dead, to honour their memory by taking up their cause where they left of. Revenge keeps faith between generations; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for the community’s dead – therein lies its legitimacy. Reconciliation is difficult precisely because it must compete with the powerful alternative morality of violence. Political terror is tenacious because it is an ethical practice. It is a cult of the dead, a dire and absolute expression of respect.

One has to wonder whether it wouldn’t be better for humanity to simply forget the outrages of the past, given the tragic way in which they perpetuate conflict into the present and future. Like feuding gangs, human beings feel this constant compulsion to respond to every slight with a larger slight, and pay back every rape and murder with two more.

Given the course of Michael Ignatieff’s life, the book also highlights the tragic theatrical character of government and opposition. As a journalist, Ignatieff could grapple with major political and ethical questions with a kind of integrity and with acceptance that the answers derived from history are usually imperfect and uncertain. As a politician, he must engage in a much less sophisticated slinging back-and-forth of accusations. One of many unfortunate facts about political life is that proximity to power tends to be accompanied by a cheapening of discourse.

Essential Mac apps

One thing doing a clean install of your operating system does is remind you of which bits of software are most essential – the ones you can’t go long without missing.

Here’s the order in which I re-populated my Mac’s application folder:

  1. Starcraft II – the game that prompted the whole process
  2. iPhoto – for storage of digital ‘negatives’
  3. Quicksilver – application launcher and superior alternative to Spotlight
  4. TextMate – excellent text editor and coding tool
  5. Firefox – better than Safari, especially with AdBlock
  6. Skype – to keep in touch with phoneless friends

I will make note of when I install other vital apps, like Fetch (FTP program) and the indispensable Photoshop.

One distinctly nice thing about Mac OS is that, because I used Time Machine to backup and restore my user profiles, all my application preferences were preserved.

The Periodic Table

In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain voted Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table to be the best science book ever written. On the basis of that endorsement, I was expecting something along the lines of a very well-written history of the discovery of the elements. Levi’s book differs substantially from that expectation; it is a kind of post-Holocaust memoir, presented in the form of twenty one sketches named after elements. Most have an element of mystery to them, usually involving an investigation of the nature of a substance or the cause of a change. Ultimately, the book feels deeply personal, set against a backdrop of very practical chemistry: the sort where a couple of men in Italy scrape together a living synthesizing pyruvic acid, or making stannous chloride from tin, to sell to small-scale mirror manufacturers.

In many ways, the one of the book is established in relation to the second world war, and especially the Holocaust. In a story focused on the dynamic between prisoner-chemists and one of their masters in Auschwitz , Levi contemplates some of the ethics of complicity:

I admitted that we were not all born heroes, and that a world in which everyone would be like him is, that is, honest and unarmed, would be tolerable, but this is an unreal world. In the real world the armed exist, they build Auschwitz, and the honest and unarmed clear the road for them; therefore every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.

For the most part, however, the book meditates on much more ordinary sorts of human relationships and is full of wise observations. Describing the purpose of the project, Levi explains that:

[I]n this book I would deliberately neglect the grand chemistry, the triumphant chemistry of colossal plants and dizzying output, because this is collective work and therefore anonymous. I was more interested in the stories of solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine: but it has also been the chemistry of the founders, who did not work in teams but alone, surrounded by the indifference of their time, generally without profit, and who confronted matter without aids, with their brains and hands, reason and imagination.

At times, the abstract realities of chemistry provide solace. A compound used in high-end lipstick is most abundantly found in the excrement of vipers, but that is as good a source as any since molecules are molecules without reference to their history. Near the end, Levi tells the true story of a single atom of carbon that finds it was around the Earth – incorporated into rock and plant and animal – and explains how the story must be true, given the sheer multiplicity of carbon atoms circulating in the world.

Ultimately, that Levi excels at is the sketching of character: whether it is his own, that of the various objects of romance or curiosity he encounters, or that of compounds and the elements themselves. As such, the book is very human: a consideration of how a thoughtful person functions in a world where some conditions are established through immutable physical laws, and others through the opaque decision-making of the powerful.

CBC documentary on geoengineering

Like it or not, an increasing amount of attention is being given to geoengineering – the idea of deliberately modifying the climate system to counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases.

On November 25, the CBC documentary series Doc Zone is broadcasting the premiere of Playing God With Planet Earth: Can Science Reverse Global Warming? According to the promotional materials, the documentary:

explores the last ditch efforts of scientists and engineers trying to avert a planetary meltdown.

As the threat of climate change grows more urgent, scientists are considering radical and controversial schemes to rehabilitate the climate. Since none of these wild—and possibly dangerous—ideas have ever been tried before, the filmmakers used a distinctive “painted animation” technique (like a “graphic novel”) to explore these futuristic scenarios.

“Human ingenuity could temporarily roll back the effects of global warming. At the same time, it could cause catastrophic damage and spark deadly political conflict,” says director Jerry Thompson.  “We’ve interviewed some of the world’s leading scientists, engineers, environmentalists, lawyers, and disaster-relief workers about the possible consequences of intentionally manipulating the climate—versus the risk of doing nothing.”

In addition to the Thursday screening on CBC television, it will be possible to watch online on the show’s website.

If readers do end up watching it, please consider leaving a comment about it here.

Instant message only passwords

Most email providers now provide instant message (IM) functionality as well. GMail has GTalk, Microsoft’s Hotmail has MSN Messenger, and so forth.

GMail accounts, in particular, are likely to contain large amounts of sensitive information. As such, it is worrisome to turn over one’s email address and password to something like a mobile phone app, so as to be able to use GTalk on the move.

I was reminded of this recently when I tried to login to Facebook Chat via Nimbuzz, an IM app for Nokia’s Symbian OS. When I tried to set up my Facebook account, Facebook warned me of how Nimbuzz would be able to access a huge heap of information about me and all of my friends. I don’t know anything about the company that makes this software: how good their security practices are, whose legal jurisdiction they fall under, how many voyeuristic employees have access to their login credential database, etc.

To reduce the level of risk associated with IM clients, I suggest that companies like Google allow users to set two passwords: one that allows access to their whole account, and another that only allows you to log into it for purposes of instant messaging. That way, if the makers of an IM client turn out to be evil or incompetent, the scope of the damage is constrained.