Rants – Page 50 – a sibilant intake of breath

The folly of Apollo redux

In an earlier post, I discussed the wastefulness of manned spaceflight. In particular, plans to return to the Moon or go to Mars cannot be justified in any sensible cost-benefit analysis. The cost is high, and the main benefit seems to be national prestige. Human spaceflight is essentially defended in a circular way: we need to undertake it so that we can learn how human beings function in space.

A post on Gristmill captures it well:

Let me be clear. There is a 0 percent chance that this Moon base or anything like it will ever be built, for the following reason: the moon missions in the ’60s and early ’70s cost something like $100 billion in today’s dollars. There is no way that setting up a semipermanent lunar base will be anything other than many times more expensive. That would put the total cost at one to a few trillion dollars.

Assuming that this taxpayer money needs to be lavished on big aerospace firms like Lockheed anyhow, it would be much better spent on satellites for the study of our planet (Some comprehensive temperature data for Antarctica, perhaps? Some RADAR analysis of the Greenland icecap? Some salaries for people studying climatic feedbacks?) or on robotic missions to objects of interest in the solar system.

A (very) partial response to David Suzuki

Last night, I saw David Suzuki speak at a conference on health and the environment. To my surprise, I was far from impressed with most of what he said. He essentially presented a false binary: conspicuous consumption on the one hand, or the preservation of pristine nature on the other. While I certainly acknowledge that a lot of consumption is unnecessary, that doesn’t mean that all sacrifices are of the same moral variety as him choosing not to fly to Australia.

The view that pesticides should not be used in farming was broadly echoed. No doubt, there can be abuse of pesticides and there is a human and ecological cost associated with employing them. That said, it hardly seems that we can take a message of pesticide abandonment to a world of six billion, in which one and a half billion live in extreme poverty. Calling for an end to economic growth means something rather different in Canada than it does in Brazil or Bangladesh or Bolivia. Likewise, not everyone in Canadian society can switch to more ecological (and expensive) options while making only trivial sacrifices.

As a public relations figure, Suzuki obviously has to simplify his messages and present things in a form that is fairly easily repeated and absorbed. That said, the parks-versus-SUVs form of environmentalism doesn’t have much chance of being relevant outside the thinking of a privileged global elite.

Don’t steal my focus

Using a computer before multitasking is a concept so alien as to be almost unimaginable. Imagine, working with an Excel spreadsheet and Word document, having to close down one program entirely before you could use another. At the same time, the profusion of programs on the contemporary desktop brings problems of its own. The one that bothers me most is probably ‘focus stealing.’ (‘Focus theft’ would be correct, but I have never seen the term used.)

Say you are in the middle of typing an email. Suddenly, some irksome and entirely unrelated window appears, telling you that updates are available for X piece of software, or acknowledging that file Y has downloaded. Focus is stolen, and dealing with both tasks in a jumble takes a lot more time than dealing with them sequentially would have been.

At the root of this is a failure of design. The first failure is on the part of the application designers. Non-urgent messages should not pop up in the middle of other tasks. The same rule should be applied by people who create operating systems. They also have the opportunity to build annoyance prevention mechanisms right into the operating environment. Ideally, there should be three possible levels of notification:

Urgent system messages: if my battery is going to die in sixty seconds, I need to know it.
Notification of messages from a real human being who is actually online and who you are talking to. Most instant message programs are pretty aggressive about making this fact known, but Skype hides all non-call events like dirty secrets.
General announcements like ‘you have email’ or ‘this software can be updated.’ Ideally, it should be possible to group all of these and get them as a digest every hour or so.

A few such features would probably garner a lot more appreciation – over the long term – than creating shiny new user interfaces.

Web abuse

Spam is terribly frustrating stuff, partly because of how it is inconvenient and partly because of how it is a cancer that wrecks good things. (See previous: 1, 2, 3) The ideal internet is a place of free and honest communication. Spammers create the need for extensive defenses and scrutiny which take time to maintain and diminish that openness and spontaneity.

If you think the spam in your email inbox is bad, just consider yourself lucky that you do not also have to deal with comment and trackback spam on two blogs, a wiki, YouTube videos, and a half dozen secondary places. There are even phony marketing bots on Facebook now: keep your eyes peeled for ‘Christine Qian’ and ‘her’ ilk.

In the end, while decentralized approaches to spam management are time consuming and annoying, they are probably better than centralized systems would be. With the latter, there is always the danger of the wholesale manipulation and censorship of what is able to find its way online, or be transmitted across the web.

Parliament light show

On Parliament Hill, they put on a giant multimedia show twice a night. It is called Canada: the Spirit of a Country and it is both preachy and prescriptive. To anyone even slightly wary of government dictating values from on high, it seems a bit disturbing. It definitely seems absurd and over-done.

I hadn’t properly seen it before yesterday, when Emily and I happened across it. While the virtues it expresses are generally admirable, the delivery is incredibly Orwellian. Between psychedelic bursts of light projected across the front of Parliament, it plays videos and expounds in both official languages on the virtues of diversity and cultural exchange, peacekeeping, and the like. It’s like an over-the-top ‘Part of our Heritage’ commercial, though it seems a lot more disturbing. While the message may be an innocuous one, the propaganda approach is off-putting and the overenthusiastic promotion of Canada seems very much like a case of too much effort.

If you ignore the words, the light show itself is quite dramatic, though also profoundly discordant. It is very odd to see huge spinning abstract purple shapes projected all across Parliament, suddenly replaced with a pattern that looks like the razzle dazzle ships of World War I.

Standing within 50m of the war memorial, one might hope that we have moved beyond nationalism. At an aesthetic level, one might at least hope that we have moved beyond the kind of crude, half-deluded, and self-serving nationalism that the light show seems to represent.

The inaccessibility of rail

There seem to be a lot of rail fans who read this blog. Like me, they would probably lament how the main train station in Ottawa was moved from downtown to a site 5km out of town that is only easily reached by highway. Admittedly, this happened in 1966, but it only came to my attention recently.

Definitely one of the most annoying aspects of inter-city public transit is how the stations tend to be located in inaccessible and often dangerous parts of town. Of course, with real estate prices being where they are – and with the ever more entrenched dominance of the automobile – that seems unlikely to change soon.

Hollywood physics

Deficiencies in movie physics can be good fun to dissect and mock, but a recent paper suggests that they are less benign. “Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy” suggests that the absurdities that abound in popular films actually weaken the people’s ability to understand how the world works. The paper concludes that:

Hollywood is reinforcing (or even creating) incorrect scientific attitudes that can have negative results for the society. This is a good reason to recommend that all citizens be taught critical thinking and be required to develop basic science and quantitative literacy.

Specific issues discussed in the paper include projectile motion, Newton’s laws, impulse, buoyancy, and angular momentum. Certainly, some films underplay the dangers of high falls and similar phenomena – as well as playing up the dangers of things like automobiles spontaneously exploding.

Personally, I would prefer a world in which movies portrayed all the sciences in realistic and accessible ways. Unfortunately, such films are in perpetual danger of being ignored in favour of flashy absurdities like the The Core or the egregious recent Star Wars films.

Reading these entertaining reviews is a good after-the-fact vaccine.

Bad design and the Nokia 6275i

The way my Nokia 6275i stores text messages is very stupid. To begin with, it can hold 100 of them. Whether the internal memory (32 megabytes) is completely full or empty, that is the number. The message “hi” uses up a slot, just like any other message would. If you can use the internal memory for photos or videos or ringtones, why can’t you use it for text messages? 32 megabytes is enough for several novels worth of text.

Also ill considered is how it deals with the limit. You have three choices. You can set up the phone so that, once it is full, it explains this fact to you whenever someone sends you a message, which it does not store. Alternatively, you can tell it to automatically delete messages from your inbox, sent items, or both. If you set it to overwrite inbox, it slowly fills with sent messages, until you have 99 messages in the sent folder and can only keep one in your inbox at a time. If you set it to overwrite sent items, the converse occurs. If you set it to overwrite both, it lets the inbox fill while still deleting all sent messages. Keeping at least the last five of each would be far more sensible. Often, you send someone a message and – an hour later – get a response that only makes sense if you still have (or still remember) exactly what your original message said.

If you want to ensure that a particular message not be deleted, you can put it in your ‘archive.’ It still uses up one of your 100 slots, but at least it will not be deleted by the over-writing algorithm.

Finally, if anyone sends a message of more than 160 characters, it just deletes all the text beyond that. Every Nokia phone I had previously would split overly long messages into multiple versions. With this phone, written conversations with some people take on the feeling of reading a heavily censored CIA document.

To Nokia’s software engineers: please try to be less obtuse in how you design the critical functions of your phones. Those of us who send more than thirty text messages a day consider it a key feature. A few sensible changes will leave your customers a lot less annoyed.

oint(Musca domestica)ment

The 6:15am rumble of heavy trucks is one limitation of living three metres from a busy road. They are joined in cacophony by commuters in cars and on motorbikes, building into an intense parade by the time when I need to walk to work. The level of sound is more than sufficient to make attempts at sleep fruitless.

I am considering switching the placement of my bedroom and living room. It would make the flat somewhat awkward, but it would allow greater privacy (especially while I have no blinds) and hopefully sounder sleep. In any case, I need to pick up a box of industrial strength earplugs for myself and any guests who I have in the future.

Persistently homeless

A third apartment (65 Robert St, in the Golden Triangle area) has gone to someone who submitted an application first. This time, it was especially galling. The landlord refused to give it to me until I paid the first and last month’s rent in the form of a cashier’s cheque. It took some scrambling to get that much money together at short notice. Still, I managed to get it together this morning, called the man, and learned that he rented the apartment yesterday to someone who paid in cash.

Perhaps it was for the best. The man was extremely irritable and aggressive and, as such, might not have been somebody who I wanted to deal with on a regular basis for a year or more. Still, it is a shame to lose such a well situated possibility.