Geek stuff – Page 127 – a sibilant intake of breath

Geologic time

While the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, all of human civilization has been compressed into a single geological epoch: the Holocene. This has been ongoing for about 11,500 years, predating the first Mesopotamian civilizations for which we have any evidence. Prior to the Holocene was the Pleistocene, which ended with the Younger Dryas cold spell. Actually, the Holocene exists more as a demarcation for the period of geologic time that has included human civilization than as an epoch with an independent definition.

Our best ice core samples extend back 650,000 years: about a third of the way into the Pleistocene, but just a tiny foray into geologic time. Pollen from Lake Tanganyika might take us through the Pliocene (Greek for ‘more new’) and into the Miocene (‘less new’). Perhaps some yet-unanticipated data source will be able to take us further still.

It is amazing what scientists are able to determine from inference and the meticulous collection of data: from the age of the universe to the evolutionary history of the planet.

Heat, bacteria, and evolution

For those who are unfamiliar, capsaicin is one of the most interesting molecules out there. This is the chemical that makes chili peppers spicy; it is also the active ingredient in pepper spray. Pure capsaicin is rated at about 15 million Scoville heat units: a scale where Tabasco sauce is scored at about 2,500.

Capsaicin is quite an amazing adaptation, actually. Plants developed it to deter animals from eating them. Eventually, animals realized that capsaicin was painful to them, but not actually harmful. By contrast, it is very harmful to some of the species of bacteria that spoil food. As such, spicy foods emerged in hot climates as a defence against nasty prokaryotes. A direct descendent of that realization are the veggie vindaloos I enjoy so much.

Spices have been mentioned here before.

Jeffersonian trivia

Little known facts:

Former American President Thomas Jefferson was an avid amateur palaeontologist.
In an attempt to mock him, his political opponents gave him the nickname “Mr. Mammoth” during the 1808 election.
He is credited with the discovery of an enormous ground sloth, larger than an elephant, that inhabited North America during the late Pleistocene.
The creature now bears his name: Megalonyx jeffersonii.

These and many other entertaining facts come from the marvellous recent book The World Without Us, which has leapt to the top of my reading pile. I will post a full review when I finish it.

The Storm Worm

The Storm Worm is scary for a number of good reasons. It acts patiently, slowly creating a massive network of drone machines and control systems, communicating through peer-to-peer protocols. It gives little evidence that a particular machine has been compromised. Finally, it creates a malicious network that is particularly hard (maybe impossible, at this time) to map or shut down.

This is no mere spam-spread annoyance. If it takes over very large numbers of computers and remains in the control of its creators, it could be quite a computational force. The only question is what they (or someone who rents the botnet) will choose to use it for, and whether such attacks can be foiled by technical or law-enforcement means. Hopefully, this code will prove a clever exception to the norm, rather than a preview of what the malware of the future will resemble.

Normally, I don’t worry too much about viruses. I use a Mac, run anti-virus software, use other protective programs, make frequent backups, and use the internet cautiously. While those things are likely to keep my own system free of malware, I naturally remain vulnerable to it. That’s where most spam comes from. Also, there is the danger that a network of malicious computers will crash or blackmail some website or service that I use. With distributed systems like Storm, the protection of an individual machine isn’t adequate to prevent harm.

Previous related posts:

Sputnik at 50

Even the Google logo has been altered to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1: the first artificial satellite. As someone who spends a very considerable amount of time thinking about how things are going to be in 2050 and 2100, it is remarkable to reflect upon both how different the world is from that of 1957 and how similar it is. The big changes that occurred have often been in areas that few if any people would have anticipated the importance of back then. Areas of great enthusiasm, such as nuclear power and space exploration, have only progressed incrementally since the 1950s and 60s.

I mentioned one Sputnik-related irony in a paper published back in 2005:

At the end of August, 1955, the Central Committee of the Communist Party approved the Soviet satellite program that would lead to Sputnik and authorized the construction of the Baikonour Cosmodrome. This facility, the largest of three Soviet launch sites that would eventually built, was the launching place of Sputnik I (and subsequent Sputniks), and the launch site for all Soviet manned missions…

This former stretch of Kazakhstani desert was also, fatefully, the place to which Nikifor Nikitin was exiled by the Czar in1830 for “making seditious speeches about flying to the moon.” He might have taken cold comfort in the fact that in 1955, the Central Committee gave control of the site to the new Soviet ‘Permanent Commission for Interplanetary Travel.’

For all the drama, it remains unclear to me that manned spaceflight serves any useful scientific or practical purpose at this point in time (see previous). In that sense, perhaps Sputnik – rather than John Glenn – was the true template for humanity’s future involvement in space: an 83.6kg ball of metal with a radio transmitter.

PS. My thesis mentions one somewhat surprising connection between Sputnik and climatic science:

A fortuitous bit of funding produced one of the most famous graphs in the climate change literature: the one tracking CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Examining it closely, a gap can be seen in 1957, where David Keeling’s funding for the project ran out. The Soviet launch of Sputnik I on 4 October 1957 led to a marked concern in the United States that American science and technology had fallen behind. One result of the subsequent surge in funding was the resumption of the CO2 recording program, which continues to the present day.

This graph is the jagged, upward-sloping line that Al Gore devotes so much attention to near the beginning of An Inconvenient Truth.

The Two Mile Time Machine

Richard Alley’s The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Change, and Our Future provides a good, though slightly dated, explanation of the science of ice core sampling, as a means for studying the history of Earth’s climate. Alley focuses on work conducted in Greenland prior to 2000. The book combines some surprisingly informal background sections with some rather technical passages about isotopic ratios and climatic cycles. Overall, it is a book that highlights the scientific tendency to dive right into the details of one area of inquiry, while skimming over many others that actually relate closely – especially if you are trying to use the science as the basis for sound decision-making.

This book does not really warrant inclusion in the first tier of books to read on climate change, but it certainly provides some useful background for those trying to develop a comprehensive understanding of the area. Arguably, the best contribution it makes is explaining the causes and characteristics of very long climatic cycles: those stretching over millennia or millions of years, with causes including orbital variation, continental drift, and cryosphere dynamics.

Given the amount of new data and analysis that has been undertaken since this book was published, a new edition may well be warranted. In particular, the very tenuous conclusions of Alley’s concluding chapters should either be revised, or defended in the fact of the new data.

Dear Apple: please quit it with the sabotage

One of the worst things about Apple is how they sabotage their own products with software updates. The update for wrecking unlocked iPhones is a recent example, but there are plenty of others. I remember when they restricted iTunes so that only five people could access your library every time you booted up. That made sharing music on big local area networks (like university residences) a lot less effective. Also, I remember when they forced a volume limitation on my iPod Shuffle by means of an update. I don’t think there has been a useful feature added to iTunes for years, except maybe the automatic downloading of album art for songs in your existing libraries.

Now, I only install security updates on my Mac. Anything promising new features is just too risky.

Musical introduction

For many years now, I have wanted to know more about the history and details of music. Other than listening, my musical experience is all more than a decade old, and consists of (badly) playing the recorder and autoharp in elementary school. From time to time, various friends with musical knowledge have given me some informal background information, but I would appreciate something more comprehensive.

Can anyone suggest a book that does a good job of laying out what things like chords, octaves, syncopation, fugue, etc, etc actually mean? I tend to appreciate books that combine technical with historical elements best. Something that covers the evolution of music may be ideal.

Unlocking the iPhone

There is a lot of huffing and puffing going on about people ‘hacking’ the iPhone. At the heart of the matter are the twin definitions of the verb ‘hack’ that are not always well recognized. Many people take ‘hacking’ to mean malicious invasion of electronic systems, for instance in order to steal credit card numbers. An older definition of the word is simply to tinker with technology. In this sense, a ‘hack’ might be a clever modification of a bicycle or a mobile phone.

Apple has been exploiting all the hype about the iPhone to make highly preferential deals with individual carriers. This has happened in the US and UK already, doubtless with more to follow. These arrangements seem to benefit Apple and the carriers, but I doubt very much that they benefit the consumer. It is like Toyota building cars that can only be filled at Shell service stations, then trying to prosecute people who try to remove the restrictions, allowing them to be filled elsewhere. Just as the people own the cars and should thus be free to modify them in ways that do not endanger others, people who own iPhones should be able to tinker with them. Likewise, just as the Toyoto-Shell case is clear-cut collusion of the kind governmental competition authorities police, so too does the Apple-cell carrier situation.

Refraction and arctic solar canines

Both for work and my own interest, I am reading Richard Alley’s The Two Mile Time Machine, as recommended back in Oxford by Henry Shue. A relatively informal history of ice core science, it also includes some interesting facts and observations about the polar regions. For instance, I learned about the phenomenon of sun dogs or parhelions.

In the Arctic, ice crystals in cirrus and cirrostratus clouds sometimes produce a refractive effect, framing the sun with a pair of luminous partners. It gladdens me somewhat to know that the Arctic summer has at least one visual effect to compensate for the drowning out of the Northern Lights by constant sunlight. I once had the good fortune Aurora Borealis myself – from Neal’s balcony in the Gage Towers during a period of exceptional ionic activity in the upper atmosphere. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to see a sun dog before the Arctic changes beyond all recognition.