climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Along with revising, I am now working on my final paper for the M.Phil. As with the previous one on the environment, this is for the international law course with Vaughan Lowe and Adam Roberts. With that submitted by Friday, only exam preparation will remain.
The weather is doing its bit to aid the process along. Few people are out enjoying the spring greening of Oxford while there is so much rain coming down.
I have been annoyed recently by full-page ads in which RIM is advertising the navigational capabilities of their new BlackBerries. They suggest that people can throw away maps and compasses and wholeheartedly embrace the combination of GPS and electronic maps.
I know firsthand how useful GPS can be. As an altimeter or a way of locating yourself in a featureless landscape, it cannot be beaten. Likewise, it is very helpful for quickly figuring out where you are when you are out on the water in a canoe or kayak. All the same, I think there is a fundamental value in being able to read a map, locate yourself on it, and work out a course to where you want to be. It isn’t enough to take a course in these things and forget about it. As with any complex skill, practice is important.
Some common sense is also a necessity, no matter how you are navigating. If your GPS-based automobile navigation system tells you to drive along train tracks, you should be aware that machines are fallible, and highly stupid as well. They have no common sense by which to evaluate whether, for instance, a bridge has been washed out or whether a linear course between A and B includes a series of lethal cliffs. There is also the small matter that some dead batteries a splash of water or a dropped piece of gear could knock out both your map and compass equivalent, if you are relying on a GPS system.
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A night that one had no reason to expect to be abnormal has actually been highly interesting, though in entirely non-academic senses. I learned about how delicious Ketjap Manis is, a bit about Greenpeace, lots about a private Oxford company of interest, some things about friends of mine, and a bit about improvised cooking. The dish was invented in three stages, while being cooked, and worked out quite well.
In some ways, this last Oxford term is proving a lot like my first.
Sun Microsystems sent me a free copy of Solaris 10 to try. Now, I just need a SPARC or x86 system on which to install it. This will probably need to wait until my return to Canada. Once I am in a more settled environment (unlikely to move for more than a couple of years), I intend to set up a server or two of my own.
NASA has announced some more details on the James Webb telescope, slated to replace Hubble as the most important such instrument in orbit. Hubble is located in an elliptical low Earth orbit, with an orbital height of 589km and an orbital velocity of 7,500 m/s. The Webb will be located at Lagrange Point 2. This is an area where gravity will keep the telescope in a sun-earth line. As a result, the telescope will always be in the shadow of the Earth. NASA has a report on the transition.
Hubble has been one of NASAs great successes over the last 17 years, both in terms of the quality scientific information generated and in terms of the way the project reflects upon the organization. By finally offering an astronomical vantage point not affected by the Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble has been able to make unprecedented observations and discoveries. For example, consider the various exoplanets discovered in recent years, either because of how they obscure stars by passing in front of them or cause stars to wobble with their gravitational pull. Hubble was also ideally placed to observe the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter. I remember watching the video feed from that at the Vancouver Planetarium, back in 1994. Some pretty stunning images of the universe have also been generated.
Just yesterday, Hubble may have observed a ring of dark matter. Given the disjoint between how galaxies behave gravitationally and the number and mass of stars we can observe, scientists have speculated that most of the material composition of the universe consists of dark matter and dark energy. The former has gravitational effects but does not interact with electromagnetic radiation. The latter is hypothetically involved in universal expansion: serving as one possible explanation for why the universe is expanding at an expanding rate, as observed through the Doppler shift. Data from the remainder of Hubble’s operational life and the full span of the Webb telescope’s operation may help with the refinement or rejection of both of these ideas, with coincidental improvement in our understanding about the contents and evolution of the universe.
Hubble has been discussed here before. A song about the Doppler shift has also been linked.
I learned an interesting fact at my second Wadham High Table dinner in as many days. Apparently, the antibiotic tetracycline binds aggressively with calcium. This is why you can’t drink milk when you are taking it, since the drug will bond to the milk and not enter your bloodstream. For the same reason, it builds up inside bones and teeth that are growing. If you examine a skeleton from a person who took tetracycline, the bones that were growing at the time can be made to fluoresce.
Because tetracycline turns brown when exposed to light, people who take these drugs while their teeth are still growing are likely to have them turn brown permanently.
In recognition of how half the global population now lives in cities, this week’s issue of The Economist has a survey on urbanization. Much of it makes for fascinating reading. For instance, they allege that the Kibera slum in Nairobi exists more for reasons of corruption than of poverty. The provision of private services and the need for constant bribery make its continued existence profitable, just as the pool of cheap labour it provides plays an important economic role.
As always, they come up with some interesting statistics, as well. Vancouver is ranked as the most livable city in the world, and one is reminded that Tokyo has a larger population than all of Canada. Delhi has the world’s dirtiest air, as measured by particulates, followed by Cairo and Calcutta. More than 70% of all urban dwellers in sub-Saharran Africa live in slums. In Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda that figure is over 90%.
The United Nations envisions human population growth as a phenomenon that will eventually slow, leaving the world with a population of about eleven billion. By then, more than 60% of people will be living in cities, dependent upon agricultural productivity elsewhere to be able to sustain themselves. Hopefully, climate change and other ecological phenomena will not make that overly challenging.
As dysfunctional family films go, this is a clever and artistic one. Tolstoy was right to say that the genre is infinite. This film has strong hints of The Royal Tenenbaums: over-the-top characters, bearded men trying to commit suicide, and a similar tendency towards set-piece funny lines. At times, it is very funny indeed.
The first time I watched the film, it was unfortunately interrupted about ten minutes before the end. Only tonight did I finally get to see the conclusion, based on my flatmate Kai’s enviable collection of DVDs.
Little Miss Sunshine is recommended to those who like humour based on bizarre characterization and a have a reasonable tolerance for social criticism and absurdity. While the film is sometimes a bit on the disturbing side, it never comes close to the unwholesomeness of child beauty contests themselves.
PS. This is what my father and I intended to go see, only to find ourselves watching The Devil Wears Prada.
As time goes by and Google indexes more and more of my content, I get more spam of every variety. I get spam emails, spam comments on the blog, and spam added to the wiki. Of the three, the email spam is the most common, but also the most easily dealt with. It has existed for so long that good systems exist for dealing with it: whether based on Bayesian reasoning or on group filtering processes. The former are largely centered around word usage. If an email contains the word ‘Viagra’ the chances of it being spam are high. If it includes the string of characters ‘V1agr4!!!’ it is virtually certain to be spam. The latter are based on user reporting. Most spam isn’t very original. As such, if GMail has 1000 people report that a particular message is spam, it can pretty reliably block it for everybody else.
I cannot get too far into how this blog’s anti-spam system works. This is because automated systems seem to have become capable of determining which system or combination of systems a site is using and then launching an appropriate attack. Suffice it to say that the blog uses a variant of both approaches above, plus one more special thing. Since the system was implemented, it has dealt with spam from 9188 different IP addresses. Security through obscurity may not be intelligent or rubust in many circumstances, but it works well enough when you are somewhat better defended than most sites, not of much value to attack, and surrounded by sites with much worse systems.
The wiki is the most vulnerable, precisely because the intended purposes of a wiki requires easy editing. Given that so few users contribute to mine, the best solution might be to lock it down so that only those with approved accounts can access it.
One possible lesson to be drawn from this is that technology eventually evolves the ability to deal with abuse. The older the system being attacked is, the more likely a sensible and effective set of countermeasures will be developed. Alternatively, it is possible that the more open approaches used by blogs and wikis are fundamentally more vulnerable to abuse.
Only time will tell.
This week, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling related to the ‘obviousness’ test in patent filing. The case – KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc. (PDF) – hinged on whether an automatic adjustment device for an accelerator pedal created by KSR infringed upon the patents of Teleflex. KSR argued that the combination of technologies was obvious, and that Teleflex could not claim royalties.
In order to maintain a fair and beneficial system, the condition that patents cover non-obvious innovations is highly important. The whole reason for granting patents is to foster innovation by granting temporary monopolies to innovators. Patents are meant to include enough information to allow a skilled practitioner to actually make the thing being patented. Under this system, inventors are meant to be willing to disclose the nature of what they have accomplished so that it might serve to aid the investigations of others. In exchange, they get legal rights over their invention for a defined period of time. This trade-off hardly makes sense when companies are permitted to patent trivial innovations, such as the much ridiculed patent awarded to Amazon.com for ‘one click shopping.’
Recently, there have been a good number of cases where the patent system is accomplishing something quite unlike this ideal. ‘Patent trolls‘ acquire patents of a broad and obvious kind, then wait for another company to release a successful product that arguably infringes on them. More often than not, the objective is simply to receive some kind of payment in return for ending the legal hassle. Of course, this interferes with the processes of innovation, as well as undermining the general credibility of the patent system. RIM and Vonage have both recently been targeted by such suits.
It seems sensible that patent offices should be more aggressive in their interpretations of what it means for an invention to be ‘novel’ and ‘non-obvious.’ As such, they would reduce the occurrences in which someone is unfairly granted rights over an idea that many other people have likely come up with, but not bothered to go through the process of trying to patent. It would also reduce the danger of patent trolling, particularly if the courts recognize that such behaviour can be predatory, and that the patent system ultimately exists to serve the public good.
PS. Slashdot has commented on the Supreme Court ruling. Most of these entries are also relevant.