Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Grating coupler arrays as cameras

A recent Economist article describes a novel camera design with the promise to be far thinner than those that exist now, with some novel features:

Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.

…

To mimic the image-making role of the optics in conventional cameras, the OPA manipulates incoming light using electrons. Dr Hajimiri compares the technique to peering through a straw while moving the far end swiftly across what is in front of you and recording how much light is in each strawful. In the OPA this scanning effect is created by manipulating the light collected by the grating couplers electronically, using devices called photodiodes. These place varying densities of electrons into the amplified light’s path through the OPA, either slowing it down or speeding it up as it travels. That shifts the arrival times of the peaks and troughs of the lightwaves. This “phase shifting” results in constructive interference between waves arriving from the desired direction, which amplifies them. Light coming from other directions, by contrast, is cancelled through destructive interference. Change the pattern of electrons and you change the part of the image field the OPA is looking at. Scanning the entire field in this way takes about ten nanoseconds (billionths of a second).

…

To zoom in for a close-up, the device selects a specific part of the image and scans it more thoroughly. To zoom out for a fish-eye, it scans the entire optical field, including light from the edges of that field. To change from zoom to fish-eye takes nanoseconds.

Doubtless, such cameras will have some interesting applications. Unfortunately, that will certainly include further entrenching the surveillance state — increasingly using devices too small to see.

Endless screams and wails

It’s selfish, but one thing I hate about living in central Toronto is that there are sirens of one type or another audible almost all day and all night long. Even when no sirens can actually be heard, I hear them screaming in my imagination.

The message: “It’s an emergency! But you can’t do anything about it” is frustrating and also a reminder of my feelings of pained impotence in response to climate change.

France’s 2017 election

What a relief! The last thing the world needs now is the EU falling apart, or another victory for an anti-immigration propagandist.

The largest problems we face now call for us to think beyond national units, about the interests and choices of humanity as a whole. Splitting into small combative tribes is a deeply maladaptive response to the pressures we’re feeling.

Why we can’t avoid dooming our grandchildren

A recent Slate article proposes a neurological mechanism for why human behaviour so frequently consists of choices where we harm our own long-term future prospects and those of others in order to satisfy near-term preferences.

Not only do our brains seem to regard our future selves as strangers, but most people rarely think about the “far future” more than a few years out, and imagining the future becomes harder as people age: “The data showed that having children or grandchildren did not increase future thinking.”

This may help explain why so many grandparents maintain behaviours and continue to support politicians who are burning up their grandkids’ future by rapidly destabilizing the climate.

Lately it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re going to permanently wreck the climate and any prospects for peace and stability in human civilization because we’re psychologically incapable of behaving otherwise. Climate change is racing at full speed through a gap in human reasoning, all because we can’t really accept how serious the consequences will be and because we are so unwilling to be the first to undertake a shared sacrifice to avoid disaster.

We don’t feel deaths equally

The January 21st issue of The Economist provides another strong example of how poorly our emotions serve us where it comes to evaluating and responding to abstract threats. They say:

NOx emissions cause the premature deaths of an estimated 72,000 Europeans a year.

This is in the context of carmakers like Volkswagen using software to cheat on NOx emissions tests for their diesel cars.

Now, if anything direct and intentional (terrorism, a criminal gang, etc) killed 72,000 people in one year in Europe it would be WWIII. The way in which we obsess about tiny direct threats from serial killers to plane hijackers while feeling little emotional impact from pollution-induced deaths and threats like climate change profoundly damages our ability to make sensible policy choices.

Google’s AdWords suck for internet security AND content generators

Having ads on this site is pretty awful for several reasons.

The site is plugged into Google via both analytics and advertising. For people not running an ad blocking plugin, this often leads to ads which are unappealing and often offensive.

If you don’t want Google to know everything you (or everyone with access to your machine) do online, you’re going to need to make a big effort and do a lot of research into, like, cryptographic and technical means of confounding state surveillance.

If you would pay one cent a year or more to support an ad-free site, please leave a comment.

Friendships and Judo aside, a miserable time

My second (worse) wave of grading for this term has begun: first year essays which we are vexatiously required to grade exclusively online.

At the same time, my PhD proposal continues to drift into strenge new realms of lateness; opening my email inbox produces blasts of panic; and it’s hard not to obsess over the insanity south of the border, even if that obsessing serves no productive purpose. The Trump victory also raises questions for my PhD project, with my supervisor making the dispiriting suggestion that it may be wise to drop Keystone XL from the analysis, and possibly refocus the whole project on opposition to natural resource projects in Western Canada, including fracking. This is about the last thing I want when I desperately need to get a proposal submitted and approved, and then get ethical approval granted.

On another note, the Lionel Massey Foundation (Massey’s student council) has acclaimed a “new College photographer” whose one set so far, from the Halloween dance, strikes me as rather amateur in quality.

To add to it all, I have not been paid for my teaching work since April 28th and have been living by drawing down the PhD account I established while still working and spending every cent I have ever earned from photography (no gear replacement or repair for the foreseeable future).

Another difficult rent day

I finally learned the reason why I haven’t been paid since my previous teaching assistant job ended in the spring. In an email from July where the body text said nothing about action on my part, one of the attachments contained instructions that have to be followed to get me into the UTM pay system. Submitting it means I will get paid for September through November at the end of this month.

During times like this, I find that I have to establish a gating mechanism for stress because I can’t hit all my deadlines if I am worrying about everything at once. That means I often need to freeze and exclude particularly stressful aspects of life until I have enough breathing room to engage with them without knocking everything else out of smooth operation.

Radios

Carrying around and being close to transmitting radios makes me nervous.

They may be programmed to harm their owner from the outset, or reprogrammed by private hackers or government forces.

They are the means through which ubiquitous surveillance is maintained, alongside agreements and clandestine action against fixed-line phone and internet providers. Perhaps the most important rule for understanding computer, internet, and network security today is that your government is attacking you.

So… when I walk around with radios it stresses me out. That includes the cell network, WiFi, and Bluetooth radios in the ragged old iPhone4 which I sometimes carry. It includes the capable and sophisticated antennas in my laser-etched Macbook.

To an extent, it includes the increasingly inescapable RFID tags built into passports, credit cards, and bank cards.

I distrust the state.

I think the unprecedented ability of the state to track and permanently archive our conversations, movements, and financial transactions alters how we should feel about democracy, governance, and technology.

If you are evil, or curious, or a nationalistic defender of state authority, you need to start studying software defined radio.

In contrast, I find radios which can only receive comforting and anachronistic. “Radio” still means to a lot of people, a machine to receive and interpret data sent by radio frequencies. GPS receivers and radio clocks are good examples.