Geek stuff – Page 77 – a sibilant intake of breath

One little bone and the power of science

A story I read recently about a new species of hominid discovered in Siberia left me feeling struck with the power of science. Inside a cave in the Altai Mountains, a single bone was discovered – the tip of an animal’s little finger. From this, scientists extracted 30 milligrams of mitochondrial DNA. From that, they were able to determine that the creature is an evolutionary relative of modern humans and that, furthermore, it represents a fourth independent instance in which human ancestors radiated out from Africa:

The common ancestor is, however, too recent for the new species to be a remnant of the first human excursion from Africa, the one that led to Java man and Peking man, now known as Homo erectus. It is, in other words, a fourth example of anthropological tourism from Africa to the rest of the world, on what is now looking like a well-worn route. Yet it is the lone example. That shows how fragmentary and ill-understood human history is.

The finger bone was found in strata dated to between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago (the bone itself has not yet been dated). That means the creature was contemporary with both Neanderthals and modern humans in the area.

It seems to me that there has been no other area of human endeavour which could have revealed so much using so little. Certainly, it demonstrates how much information is contained in ancient genetic material, and how powerful its analysis can be for understanding the history of life on Earth.

Flash grenades for photographic lighting

I have frequently pointed out the pointlessness of people using the built-in flashes on their cameras to try to light cathedrals, scenic vistas, stadiums, and the like. It should be self-evidently obvious that these small, AA-powered flashes are incapable of such a task. That said, it does seem plausible that many (even most) photographers simply use their cameras in a fully automatic mode, substituting its limited judgment for their own.

Despite all that, I had a curious thought the other night when looking across at Parliament from Champlain Hill. I know that the military and law enforcement agencies use flash grenades to surprise and disorient people inside buildings. I wonder whether it could be possible to use one or more such devices to produce photographic illumination of giant or distant objects. As long as you used a shutter speed longer than the time it takes them to flash, it should be possible to make use of their light, and triggering them could be as simple as using the radio triggers commonly employed with conventional flashes.

I wonder whether anyone has ever tried such a thing…

Singh appeal successful

In a very welcome development, science writer Simon Singh (discussed twice before in relation to alternative medicine) has won his appeal against the libel suit brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association. It was brave of him to launch the appeal, with all the further financial harm that would have accompanied another loss. Getting to this stage involved legal costs of £200,000. The whole kerfuffle was spawned when Singh wrote in an article that chiropractors promoted ‘bogus’ treatments, for which there was no scientific evidence of effectiveness. This statement was interpreted very strangely by a judge at an earlier stage in these legal proceedings, leading to much of the subsequent trouble.

This is a victory for free speech, sanity, and open inquiry. Hopefully, it will also free up some of Mr. Singh’s time to write more excellent books.

British Chiropractic Association President Richard Brown has said that they may appeal to the Supreme Court.

[Update: 11:20am] The ruling is online and worth a look. It contains some strong wording, along the lines of: “to compel its author to prove in court what he has asserted by way of argument is to invite the court to become an Orwellian ministry of truth.”

Complaints about ties and bad pockets

Perhaps more slowly than might have been expected, I am making the transition from almost exclusively owning comfortable, functional clothing of the sort that works well for climbing mountains to owning an increasing proportion of the kind of clothes I once owned in singular sets for the occasional wedding, funeral, or high table dinner.

I can’t say I object to the difference between wearing decent dress shoes and wearing $100 shoes I originally bought for a minimum wage position at Staples. Nor, living in Ottawa, can I deny the utility of long woolen coats for much of the year. I must, however, object to two intolerable aspects of formal clothing.

Impractical pockets

Firstly, I object to the pockets. There are too few of them, they are lacking in volume and ability to carry objects unobtrusively, and they are almost always too easy to lose things out of. In an ideal world, I should be able to carry all my day-to-day gear in the pockets of my jacket and trousers: keys, wallet, change, phone, iPod, headphones, point and shoot camera, liner gloves, earplugs (I like reading in silence), bus/security pass, miniature tripod, etc. In this ideal world, all of these things would also be in deep, zippered pockets that do not bulge horribly, when burdened with such necessary objects.

I have never found these desires to be satisfied by formal clothes. Keys seem absurdly capable of sawing through the pockets of dress trousers, leading to the loss of coins, phones, and other things. Jacket pockets are too few in number and too open and horizontal to be trusted. This is especially true when carrying electronic devices.

The silken noose

The other aspect of formal clothing to which I must object most forcefully is neckties. There are a number of reasons why Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a man worth taking seriously, and his hatred of neckties seems to me to be among the most convincing. The things serve no practical purpose whatsoever. Even worse, they inescapably cause frustration, annoyance, and discomfort – not least by obstructing both breathing and circulation.

I am truly glad to have been able to go many months now without wearing one, and devoutly wish to eventually find myself employed in such a place and manner that I will need to wear them only for funerals.

All the above being said, and in keeping with my earlier appeal for quality durable goods, those men who find themselves obliged to wear formal clothes often should subscribe to the blog Put This On, which is a good source of information and advice for those who have never been personally educated in such things.

1973 NSA cryptography lectures

For those with an interest in cryptography, and secure communication generally, a series of recently declassified lectures from the American National Security Agency are well worth reading. The moderately-to-heavily redacted documents from 1973 cover a number of engaging subjects. The first volume covers the importance and practicalities of secure communications, codes, one time pads, encryption systems for voice communication, various bits of specific American communication equipment, TEMPEST attacks (described as “the most serious technical security problem [the NSA] currently face[s] in the COMSEC world”), and more. The second volume includes lecture on operational security, issues around the number of sending and receiving stations, public (commercial) cryptography, the destruction of cryptographic equipment in emergency situations, and more. There are also some interesting tidbits on tropospheric and ionospheric scatter transmission systems, which bounce signals off of the upper atmosphere which are theoretically highly directional.

Originally classified Secret and ‘No Foreign,’ the lectures are well written, engaging, and illuminating. Some of it is overly technical and specific, but there is also some broadly applicable general information about cryptographic theory and practice, as well as the role of communications security organizations within governments and militaries.

Unfortunately, the PDF consists of non-searchable, and sometimes badly copied text. Still, the difficulties of reading it are minor. There are also some long gaps where entire sections have been redacted.

Food, energy, and fossil fuels

Yesterday night, I had an interesting conversation about energy, fossil fuels, agriculture, and human population. The key fact is that global agriculture is now deeply dependent on fossil fuels. They are needed for everything from running industrial farming equipment to producing fertilizer to operating the vast logistical networks through which food is processed and distributed. The key question is, what will the ramifications be when we inevitably transition from a global energy system based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable sources?

The transition is indeed inevitable, though it could happen in either of two ways. Either we can voluntarily cut back on using fossil fuels due to well-founded concerns about climate change – and awareness of the opportunities that exist in renewable energy – or we will draw down reserves to the point where it takes more energy to extract one calorie worth of fossil fuel than the fuel contains.

So, what might the post-fossil-fuel world look like? To get one idea, we can consider the world as it existed before the Industrial Revolution brought about large-scale fossil fuel use. Back in 1500, there were about half a billion people alive on Earth. The energy they relied upon was overwhelmingly from renewable sources, such as the embedded solar energy in plants. It seems plausible that returning to that kind of an energy system would return the planet’s capability of sustaining human beings to about the level that existed then: a bit higher, perhaps, because people now live in more places, and a bit lower, perhaps, because of the damage we have caused to the planet in various ways.

For an alternative, we need to consider an enhanced renewable-backed future that includes clever approaches to harnessing renewable sources of energy: solar, wind, wave, geothermal, etc. It seems to me that if we are going to have a world that does not use fossil fuels and which sustains something like as many billions as are alive now (to say nothing of in 2050 or later), such technologies are going to need to be deployed on massive scale and the world’s agricultural systems will need to be adapted to rely on them.

Fossil fuels have been an enormous energy boon for humanity. Quite possibly, they have allowed us to far overshoot where we would otherwise have been, in terms of energy use and population. Quite possibly, both of those will need to fall substantially in a post-fossil-fuel world. If there is any chance of that not taking place, it will depend on the massive deployment of the kind of advanced renewables that are already technologically feasible. That deployment will take dedication, foresight, financing, and energy. Indeed, there is surely no better use for whatever proportion of the world’s remaining fossil fuels we choose to burn than in making the solar and wind farms that will need to form most of the future energy basis for all human civilization.

Sherlock Holmes and Huckleberry Finn

During the past week or so, I listened to my first two audiobooks ever. Previously, I had been quite skeptical. To me, podcasts and the like seem to require too much concentration for use when doing anything complicated, but to not really be engaging enough to hold your attention when you are doing nothing else.

Both issues have been problematic sometimes, when listening to the free copies of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that I got from the excellent iTunes U section of Apple’s music store. I sometimes had to rewind (what an anachronistic term!) and re-listen when something distracted me. Much more rarely, I found the contents insufficiently engrossing, though Ernest Hemingway is surely correct to say that the last few chapters of Huckleberry Finn are a severe disappointment.

Both books are part of the University of South Florida’s Lit2Go collection, and they are well (though I think not professionally) read. Each is read by a single person, without much attempt made at voices or radio-play style effects. I found that both books lent themselves well to this treatment, owing perhaps to their relative simplicity and the charming datedness and foreignness of the voices in them. The books can be downloaded here and here, as well as through iTunes.

I doubt that the audiobook treatment would be as well suited to something really complex and intellectual, of the sort where you frequently need to make notes or refer back and forth through the book. Nonetheless, the audiobook medium does seem like a good one for the casual enjoyment of relatively light fiction.

Pitfalls in statistics

Statistics are a powerful thing, but they are easily to use sloppily and incorrectly. This article identifies a few important pitfalls related to statistical significance, problems with testing multiple hypotheses simultaneously, issues with clinical trials and meta-analyses, and the usefulness of Bayes’ Theorem.

While statistics are a far sounder way of knowing about the world than anecdotes and intuition, it is definitely worrisome that they are so poorly understood. My graduate statistics course at Oxford is evidence enough of just how poorly the subject can be taught.

Conference on a world more than four degrees warmer

Given our increasingly slim chances of avoiding more than 2˚C of global warming, it makes sense to start thinking about what a world hotter than that could be like.

The University of Oxford recently hosted a conference on the subject: 4degrees International Climate Change Conference: Implications of a Global Climate Change of 4 plus Degrees for People, Ecosystems, and Earth Systems.

32 of the short lectures are available free, via iTunes.

As an aside, posts might be thin here for the next while. Work is busy, and I am concentrating efforts on BuryCoal. If you haven’t had a look at that site yet, please do. Some good discussions on the posts people have already written would be just the thing.

More on Singh and libel

In a development that annoys me as much as one of my favourite novels being banned in some libraries, one of my favourite authors of non-fiction has been bullied out of having time to write columns for The Guardian by the British Chiropractic Association and the awful libel laws of the United Kingdom. It also seems probable that his book projects would be more advanced, if not for this pointless and anti-democratic headache.

Singh has been courageous enough to appeal the painful initial decision against his entirely fair and justified comments, as well as try to kick off a public movement to change the laws in the UK. The need to do so is broadly recognized, with several other jurisdictions having already passed laws to protect their citizens from ‘libel tourists’ who use the UK to file baseless or frivolous claims. Newspapers including the Boston Globe and New York Times have also complained about how British law imposes on them unjustifiably.

Having a free and democratic society depends on being able to express honestly-held and justified opinions without fear that someone will exploit the law to silence you. Hopefully, the lawmakers in the UK will change tack, reform their laws, and apologize to those who have been harmed by them already. We might also hope that people will recognize that the chiropractic view that all disease is caused by ‘subluxations’ in the spine is baseless quackery (a claim far bolder and less exhaustively justified than the one that got Singh in all this trouble).