Geek stuff – Page 11 – a sibilant intake of breath

Additively printed and magnetically bound

Today I received Bathsheba‘s Tetrabox: a 3d-printed steel sculpture which is also a puzzle held together with magnets.

At a minimum, it has what I think of as ‘tips forward‘ and ‘tips around‘ solutions. For the first, all three of the asymmetrical pieces have their extended tips pointing toward the one symmetrical piece, allowing the sculpture to rest on them. For the second, the tips circle around the symmetrical piece.

Previously, I got Bathsheba’s hemoglobin laser crystal for Amanda, and later Myshka got me the DNA polymerase crystal as a very generous birthday gift.

De-anonymization

De-anonymization is an important topic for anyone working with sensitive data, whether in the context of academic research, IT system design, or otherwise.

I remember a talk during a Massey Grand Rounds panel where a medical researcher explained how she could pick herself out from an ‘anonymous’ database of Ontarians, on the basis that her salary was public as an exact dollar figure, only people with her specific job had it, and she was the only woman in that position.

The more general idea is that by putting pieces together you may be able to identify somebody who someone else has made some effort to keep anonymous.

It’s a challenge when doing academic research and writing on social movements, when some subjects choose to be anonymous in publications. That means not just not sharing their name, but not sharing any information that could be used to identify them. That gets hard when you think about adversaries who might have access to other information (in an extreme case, governments with access to masses of information) or even just ordinary people who can combine information from multiple sources logically. The date of an event described in an anonymous quote might tell allow someone to look up where it happened online. Another quote in which a third party’s actions are described could be used to determine that the de-anonymization target wasn’t that person. And so on and on like the logical games on the LSAT or the intricacies of mole hunting.

Lee Ann Fujii wrote smart stuff about this, and about subject protection in research generally.

Subject-specific databases

One of my main strategies for organizing information is to create databases for subjects of interest. I’m using the term in the broad Wikipedia sense of “an organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically” here, and it includes everything from a single folder where PDF versions of all the references cited in a particular monograph of mine are stored to financial tracking spreadsheets, records of my weight, and sets of original RAW files for my photoshoots.

So far for my PhD research I have set up a few:

A spreadsheet of all accredited Canadian universities, with pertinent information about each divestment campaign I have identified
A master timeline for significant events in all campaigns, as well as events relevant to university divestment that happened in other institutions, like municipalities
A list of all scholarly work about university divestment campaigns, including which school(s) the authors looked at
A spreadsheet with titles and links to common document types at many campaigns, including detailed petitions like our ‘brief’, recommendations from university-appointed committees, and formal justification for university decisions
The consent database specified in my ethics protocol, which has also been useful for keeping tabs on people who I’m awaiting responses from
(Somewhat embarrassingly) A Google sheet where I manually tally how long each MS Word chapter draft is at midnight each day

For my earlier pipeline resistance project I had started putting together a link chart of relevant organizations and individuals, as well as a glossary and timeline.

I would love to have more formal training (and ideally coding ability) for working with more flexible kinds of databases than spreadsheets. That would be useful for debugging WordPress MySQL issues, but more importantly for more fundamental data manipulation and analysis. I haven’t really coded (aside from HTML and LaTeX) since long-passed days of tinkering with QBASIC and Pascal during the days of my youth in Vancouver. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to learn Python as a means of building and playing around with my own SQL databases…

Bright or invisible rocket exhaust

LOX and RP-1 never burn absolutely clean, and there is always a bit of free carbon in the exhaust, which produces a luminous flame. So when you’re looking at TV and see a liftoff from Cape Kennedy—or from Baikonur for that matter—and the exhaust flame is very bright, you can be sure the propellants are Lox and RP-1 or the equivalent. If the flame is nearly invisible, and you can see the shock diamonds in the exhaust, you’re probably watching a Titan II booster burning N₂O₄ and 50–50.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 96

One-way rocketry

Finally somebody in authority sat down and thought the problem through. The specifications of JP-4 [jet fuel] were as sloppy as they were to insure a large supply of the stuff under all circumstances. But Jupiter and Thor [ballistic missiles] were designed and intended to carry nuclear warheads, and it dawned upon the thinker that you don’t need a large and continuing supply of fuel for an arsenal of such missiles. Each missile is fired, if at all, just once, and after a few dozen of them have been lobbed by the contending parties, the problem of fuel for later salvoes becomes academic, because everybody interested is dead. So the only consideration is that the missile works right the first time—and you can make your fuel specifications just as tight as you like. Your first load of fuel is the only one you’ll ever need.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 95–6

Pre-computer rocket propellant chemistry calculations

[Calculating rocket fuel performance mathematically] gets worse exponentially as the number of different elements and the number of possible species [of reaction products] increases. With a system containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, you may have to consider fifteen species or more. And if you toss in boron, say, or aluminum, and perhaps a little chlorine and fluorine—the mind boggles.

But you’re stuck with it (remember, I didn’t ask you to do this!) and proceed—or did in the unhappy days before computers. First, you make a guess at the chamber temperature. (Experience helps a lot here!) You then look up the relevant equilibrium constants for your chosen temperature. Devoted and masochistic savants have spent years in determining and compiling these. Your equations are now before you, waiting to be solved. It is rarely possible to do this directly. So you guess at the partial pressures of what you think will be the major constituents of the mixture (again, experience is a great help) and calculate the others from them. You add them all up, and see if they agree with your predetermined chamber pressure. They don’t, of course, so you go back and readjust your first guess, and try again. And again. And eventually all your species are in equilibrium and you have the right ratio of hydrogen to oxygen and so on, and they add up to the right chamber pressure.

Next, you calculate the amount of heat which would have been evolved in the formation of these species from your propellants, and compare that figure with the heat that would be needed to warm the combustion products up to your chosen chamber temperature. (The same devoted savants have included the necessary heats of formation and heat capacities in their compilations.) And, of course, the two figures disagree, so you’re back to square one to guess another chamber temperature. And so on.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 84 (italics in original)

What it’s like to hear but not see the Toronto Air Show

A tweet of mine, written in a moment of irritability aggravated by the sound of jets roaring overhead, has gotten some attention by virtue of being incorporated into some news articles about social media commentary on the Toronto Air Show.

In addition to my standard gripes about the wastefulness of jet engine use, the undesirability of unwanted background noise, and the militarism embodied in combat aircraft development, I suggested that there are people in Toronto who find the experience of being a bystander during the noise as troubling or a reminder of trauma, having heard military jets operating at close quarters during any number of recent conflicts, from Gaza to Afghanistan to Yemen, or during interception flights carried out by domestic air forces.

A disturbing amount of the response on Twitter expressed anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly an assertion that (a) people who have experienced conflict and now live in Toronto now live in preferable life circumstances and therefore (b) they owe certain moral obligations to people who previously lived in the place they now inhabit, to wit just lumping it and not complaining while these acrobatic displays are put on. To some extent my interpretation of the comments was inevitably coloured by Twitter’s reputation as an especially hostile and personal platform, but I think even when viewed with as much objectivity as can be mustered they brought unnecessary hostility to a discussion ultimately about public policy, specifically whether such spectacles should continue.

It’s entirely fair to criticize me for assuming what somebody else’s life experience would mean, in terms of their experience of these noises. That being said, the basic parameters of something like post-traumatic stress disorder are publicly known and it seems plausible to me that anyone who has traumatic memories of being close to combat in which jets operated (whether as a soldier or a civilian) would have some chance of being triggered by the sound of an air show. Given the population of Toronto, it’s plausible that hundreds of people with PTSD are within earshot of each loud noise made by flying aircraft. It’s much more speculative, but I have also wondered about the number of people who can have panic attracts triggered by a stimulus like a jet engine sound find it triggering due to associations they have made through fiction, specifically quasi-realistic military computer games and films which realistically depict violence like Saving Private Ryan. Statistically very few people, even during times of mass conscription, faced intense combat of the kind depicted in the film, but probably a majority of the adult population has now seen multiple detailed immersive representations, whether through films like Spielberg’s or depictions like HBO’s Generation Kill or Band of Brothers.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s the same thing at all, but I have my own negative associations with hearing but not seeing military jets at low altitude nearby, as I lived in North Oxford within earshot of at least some of the approaches to RAF Brize Norton and we used to listen to Vickers refuelling aircraft and B-52s flying in at all times of day and night (familiar eventually in their shrieks and rumbles) and speculate about whether they were coming back from Iraq or from Afghanistan, maybe carrying coffins.

I don’t think social media griping is going to lead to the abolition of the airshow, but I do think it’s a good thing to have a public dialog about what people in the city are going through in terms of their mental health and the choices we make together affecting it.

Those with any opinions on the matter are invited to comment, anonymously if you like.

Security vulnerabilities in computer hardware

Why is trustworthy computer security impossible for ordinary users? In part because the system has multiple levels at which failure can occur, from hardware to operating systems and software.

Spectre and Meltdown show that no matter how careful you are about the operating sytem and software you run you can still be attacked using the underlying hardware. Another bug included at least in some VIA C3 x86 processors has similar ramifications.

These kinds of problems will be much worst with the “Internet of Things”, since bugs like Heartbleed will go unpatched, or even be unpatchable, in a lot of embedded computing applications for consumers.

Word versus LaTeX for academic publishing

There are some good discussions online about the relative merits of different types of software for writing long scholarly documents like a PhD thesis. For instance, Amrys O. Williams’ “Why you should LaTeX your dissertation; or, why you don’t have to write your dissertation in Word“.

I’ve seen the plusses and minuses of using LaTeX in academic and activism contexts first-hand and the dominant set of considerations for me concern collaboration. Theoretically, as a free and open source typesetting system LaTeX ought to be ideal for preparing complex documents. Unfortunately, whether they are university professors or student activists, it’s likely that few or none of your potential collaborators will already be familiar with LaTeX syntax or comfortable providing comments on a document in the format of LaTeX source code.

For my dissertation I have decided to write the whole thing as chapters comprised of Microsoft Word files, for the ease of my committee members. They won’t have full citations, but just the unique identifiers and any other details which I will eventually need to produce a citation in LaTeX. This way, my committee members can provide comments on Word documents and, once I have everything nailed down, I can spend a few days moving all the text into LaTeX for the preparation of the final dissertation. This way committee members also won’t be distracted by a need to minutely copy edit formatting and other trivialities, since each chapter explains that it’s just a draft for review with precise formatting to be done later.

I would rather just write the whole thing as LaTeX code in TextMate, avoiding the need to use Word at all, but a central necessity of writing a doctoral thesis is soliciting and incorporating input from committee members so all told the approach of writing in Word and later typesetting in LaTeX seems to have the most to recommend it.

Suspension of disbelief and Westworld

The suspension of disbelief has a particular peculiar character within the science fiction genre. While there is certainly sci-fi that rejects all standards of realism rooted in actual science, and which might thus be better seen as a kind of fantasy with technology, most sci-fi seeks to imagine things that could be possible in the real universe, at least if the requisite technologies and aliens show up.

When experiencing science fiction, I find myself always cataloguing two kinds of consistency and places where each breaks down. First there is consistency within the world established by the narrative. If the robots in chapter one can be easily fooled by colour photocopies of people’s faces it shouldn’t change for no reason in chapter two. In a broader sense the internal rules of the universe should be consistent. If multi-year travel times between settlements are a major part of a fictional universe, the economic and political life of the settlements should be compatible with that. The second kind of consistency is with the known rules the real universe follows. This is routinely violated by sci-fi with comic book or action hero physics, where the capabilities of technology depend on the emotional stakes and the needs of the plot, rather than serving as a template for what the characters are free to do.

I have watched the first two seasons of Westworld with both kinds of consistency in mind and have been much more frustrated by internal inconsistency than by straight-up scientific impossibility. Perhaps with the big exception of “what powers the hosts?” the show doesn’t pose many straight-up problems of practicality. Rich and determined enough people could do most of what has been depicted so far (ignoring the question of whether copying and creating conscious beings is possible as depicted). Since a lot of the show is shoot-em-up gore, perhaps the most frustrating internal inconsistency regards what it takes to actually kill the robots (called “hosts”) and specifically why damage to their physical bodies can in any circumstance damage the small protected orbs which are supposedly their brains.

It makes sense in the emotional and Western contexts that one well-placed bullet brings down anybody, but it doesn’t make sense anymore when the constraints that are supposed to make the durable, re-usable robots into suitable targets are no longer being applied, and especially when some robots just shrug off bullets now because they have been reprogrammed. We’re two seasons in and everybody is still being killed because their tougher-than-humans replaceable bodies get damaged in ways that would make a person bleed to death or otherwise no longer be able to keep vital organs functioning.

Probably the writers have an answer or will roll one out subsequently, while most fans will put it down to the rule of cool on the basis of wanting to see more human-style gunfights between the robots. To me it comes across as unsatisfying, however, and a failing or unwillingness to think through the implications of the premises which the writers have already established. They’re taking a lot of the Ghost in the Shell universe where “bodies are a dime a dozen”, but sticking with gunshot wounds as a mechanism to sometimes-permanently sometimes-temporarily kill robots. The inconsistent treatment of guns is unsatisfying in other ways too, like how apparently there was some system built into the park to keep real guns from injuring human guests (suggesting some omnipotent operating system controls everything in the park) but which one person then shuts down in only that very limited way. The way they control explosives doesn’t make sense either, with the control room approving one explosion specifically for an important guest, but robots apparently playing with real nitroglycerin in several of the park’s programmed narratives. If guests are interacting with real wagonloads of nitroglycerin, how do they not get routinely blasted to pieces? And if the park can control how badly humans versus robots are hurt by nitroglycerin explosions, why don’t we see the evidence of that kind of control in other places?

It’s basically standard in fiction that characters important to the plot are impossibly competent with their weapons, while anyone attacking them is impossibly incompetent (like the much-mocked stormtroopers in Star Wars), but this is taken to an implausible degree when a single person with an antique pistol kills whole squads of mercenaries with submachine guns before any of the mercs can notice what is happening and use a weapon.

Science fiction is meant by many authors as a means of exploring philosophical ideas, as well as the implications of technology, and allowing inconsistencies and implausibilities may be intended to serve that purpose. That’s fine as far as it goes, and it’s not for me to tell authors what plot contents are or are not appropriate in their creations. Still, to some degree the task of creative worldbuilding depends on the contents holding together with each other and when that common basis is eroded by inconsistent treatment it diminishes the plausibility and immersiveness of the entire world.