Geek stuff – Page 106 – a sibilant intake of breath

Summer has passed

Some facts for the autumnal equinox:

The Earth has seasons because it orbits the sun while tilted 23.44˚ off the vertical axis.
This tilt varies with time, following a 41,000 year cycle.
At the maximum, the tilt is 24.5˚. At the minimum, it is 22.1˚. When there is more tilt, the difference between summer and winter increases. When there is less tilt, the seasons are more similar.
Along with the changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit (eccentricity – 100,000 year cycle) and the way the planet wobbles around the pole (precession – 26,000 year cycle), axial tilt (obliquity) contributes to the Milankovitch cycles – one of the major long-term drivers of natural climate change.
To learn more, look up Dansgaard-Oeschger events and Heinrich events.

Disclaimer: Yes, orbital and solar variations affect the planet’s climate. That doesn’t mean human greenhouse gas emissions don’t, nor that they aren’t the primary cause of the climate change presently taking place!

Ultra powerful bike lights

Want to make absolutely certain drivers will see your bike in even the worst weather conditions? Dinotte sells LED head and tail lights with up to 600 lumens of brightness. They run for 3.5 to 7.0 hours on lithium-ion rechargeable batteries and cost a hefty $160-$400 a piece.

Still, that is a lot cheaper than the total costs associated with getting hit by a car.

Frustrated with Spore

There are aspects of Spore which are excellent, but far too much effort needs to be expended to keep the game from being absurdly frustrating.

When you visit other empires, you see things much as they ought to be. They have large numbers of attack and defense fleets, consisting of mother ships and fighters. These fleets will attack you if you enter their space. They will leave their space to attack nearby enemy colonies and thus capture or destroy them.

By contrast, regardless of the size of your empire, you will always be the only competent ship in it. Allied empires will provide one ship each, but these will behave like missile magnets, die almost immediately, and lead to the friendly empire blaming you for the loss of their ship. As such, it is up to you to personally defend your entire territory, as well as personally attack other systems (basically the only way to end wars once they start). Indeed, ending wars is a very tricky thing to do, especially considering that you can start one when your ship automatically returns fire on a ship that attacked you in an enemy system. Ending wars either requires conquering so many planets that the enemy sues for peace (only some races do this) or waging a genocidal campaign across their entire empire, which can easily take hours. Of course, whenever you are at war, you will be constantly attacked and obliged to manually defend whichever system(s) they have chosen to target.

There are also pirate attacks. These should ideally be ignored, since they are almost as much of a pain to fight off as attacks from rival empires and ignoring them has only a trifling consequence. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure if it is money-stealing pirates or civilization destroying enemies attacking is by flying across the galaxy to check manually.

Even more maddening are ‘ecological disasters.’ In these, a random planet somewhere within your empire or those of your allies gets five sick animals of a particular type somewhere on it. Even if your empire consists of hundreds of interconnected worlds, you are the only being that can kill these animals. Fail to do so, and the ecosystem on the planet gets destabilized, eventually destroying your colonies. Also, killing too many of the healthy animals moving in herds with the sick ones causes the extinction and makes you start over, hunting sick animals of a different kind.

Overall, the game was billed as a big universe that you could explore and experiment with however you like. Unfortunately, the frustrations built into the game make that very challenging. Implementing the following suggestions would significantly improve things:

After five ‘ecological disasters,’ you win a badge. Having this badge means that your colonies have learned to deal with these things on their own. At the most, they should ask for some money with which to fund the five animal cull.
If you accidentally start a war by firing upon a ship, you should have the chance to apologize diplomatically and pay compensation to avoid full-scale fighting.
It should always be clear whether pirates or an enemy empire are attacking you.
Enemy empires should be more willing to end wars.
Your colonies should be more capable of defending themselves.
Alternatively, much more powerful weapons should be available late in the game, so as to diminish the frustration of destroying fleet after identical fleet.
Multiple AI modes should exist for escorts. In at least one, they should flee when near death.
The game should make the status of ongoing battles clearer. At present, there is no easy way to tell when you have actually lost control of a star system.
One option to consider is giving colonies two options for wealth production. In one mode, they behave as in the current game: they produce ‘spice’ which you need to personally fly around to collect and sell. In another mode, they produce spice which is sold automatically through intermediaries. You get about 30% of the profits.

Reducing the degree to which the player needs to micomanage the galaxy would probably do the most to improve this game. Hopefully, future patches will shift things somewhat in this direction.

Deletionpedia

On Wikipedia, there is an ongoing debate between ‘inclusionists’ who feel that any factual information – no matter how trivial – is suitable for inclusion and ‘deletionists’ who think only articles with a certain level of importance should be kept. Regardless of who wins on Wikipedia itself (or rather, which balance between the two views becomes stable), another site is automatically archiving everything that gets deleted from Wikipedia: Deletionpedia provides a fairly valuable service: both by being willing to archive information of limited importance to most people, but perhaps some use to some. Also, it lets people keep tabs on what kinds of articles are being removed from Wikipedia, which should provide editorial oversight.

Plants and carbon feedback cycles

This site has generally paid a fair bit of attention to positive feedback effects associated with climate change. These are akin to when a microphone gets too close to an amplified speaker to which it is connected: the sound gets louder and louder until the maximum possible output is reached. Climatic equivalents include how melted ice exposes more dark sea water which absorbs more sunlight which melts more ice, as well as how melting permafrost releases methane which causes more warming and thus more melting. Another kind of feedback worth considering is the negative sort: essentially phenomena that are self-limiting. A non-climate example is price and the quantity of something demanded in a properly functioning market; the feedback between rising prices and fewer buyers has a self-limiting effect, preventing prices from rising infinitely. A possible negative feedback associated with climate change is that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) might spur additional growth of plants, which would incorporate the carbon into their own bodies, thus partially offsetting the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere.

A study published recently in Nature examined how 3 square metre chunks of grassland would respond to 4˚C of additional temperature, compared with a control group in otherwise identical circumstances. The grasses reduced the aperture of the stomata (pores on their leaves) to limit water loss. One result was 30% less CO2 absorption, both in the year where the heat was applied and in the year following. The editor’s summary concludes:

These findings suggest that more frequent anomalously warm years, a possible consequence of rising anthropogenic CO2 levels, could lead to a sustained decrease in CO2 uptake by terrestrial ecosystems.

Climate change will bring hotter and drier conditions in some parts of the world, making an understanding of what effect that will have on biomass rather important.

A French study of Europe’s 2003 heatwave – where temperatures sometimes reached 6˚C above normal in some areas – came to a similar conclusion about heat and dryness limiting CO2 uptake. Overall, they concluded that Europe’s plant matter went from being a net sink of CO2 (accumulating it in tissue) to a net emitter (yielding it back to the atmosphere). As such, there may well be general thresholds above which ecosystems switch from having a negative feedback effect on the climate to having a positive one.

In the end, the amount of climate change that will occur for any level of human emissions is determined by the direct effects, across several timescales, coupled with all relevant positive and negative feedbacks. Learning more about all elements of that system – through the investigation of ancient climates, experiments like this one, and careful observations – should allow for more robust and accurate climatic modeling.

Visualizing the credit crunch

So far, the credit crunch has wiped 1.86 trillion dollars off the balance sheets of investment banks, commercial banks, financial services companies, asset managers, and investors.

This graphic, produced by the New York Times, visualizes the losses, showing how unevenly distributed they are. The whole thing is really quite dramatic, even for those of us with a limited interest in finance.

Help design WordPress 2.7

For all those who complained about recent changes in the WordPress administration interface, there is a survey out collecting data on what people would like to see in version 2.7

Personally, I am perfectly happy with the design of the current system. I just hope the next version is a bit less touchy when it comes to autosaves and mysterious publication failures.

Hackers in the Large Hadron Collider

Apparently, hackers managed to take control of a website related to the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment: one of the five detectors within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This isn’t terribly surprising, since high profile websites get vandalized reasonably frequently. What is rather more disturbing is that the hackers were apparently “one step away” from the control system of the detector itself. While I don’t know the details of the design, not connecting the computers that control the machine to the internet would seem like an elementary precaution. Not connecting them to publicly accessible web servers, even more so.

Apparently, the beams circulating in the LHC will eventually have as much kinetic energy as an aircraft carrier going 12 knots – all concentrated into bunches circling the accelerator 11,000 times per second. Preventing outside access to the control systems for the sensors that will make sense of all the data seems like common sense, even if the output from those sensors is getting sent around the world for analysis.

Spore and DRM

One of the most talked about aspects of the computer game Spore is the digital rights management (DRM) software being used to prevent unauthorized copying. The SecureROM software restricts each copy to being installed on a maximum of 3 computers. Beyond that, you can call Electronic Arts and beg them to let you install it more times. Given that hardware upgrades can make your computer count as a ‘new’ one, this might happen to a lot of people.

As DRM software goes, this really isn’t that bad. It doesn’t run an annoying program in the background, like the awful Steam system that accompanied Half Life 2. It also lets you play the game without the DVD inserted.

Arguably, the key to this issue is the following: somebody is always going to crack the DRM and release pirated copies of the game without it online. As such, DRM does not stop unauthorized copying, but does inconvenience the people who actually shell out the money for the game. As such, DRM is both useless and unfair to legitimate customers. As the Sony DRM debacle demonstrates, it can also open massive security holes on the computers of those who run it.

P.S. I will write a full review of Spore once I finish it. My first impressions are quite positive. One major suggestion to anyone trying it: play a very aggressive species for the first four stages (basically winning by killing everyone). Then, start a new game at the space stage with a blank state species. If you bring your hyper-aggressive species out into the galaxy, you will spend all of your time manually defending each of your planets from attack. It is infinitely less frustrating to build an empire based on trade and teraforming, earn lots of badges, make alliances, buy some awesome weapons, and then start busting people up if desired.

RFID tinkering kit

Radio frequency identification tags are not the most secure things in the world. Indeed, they are probably the last thing you want in your credit card or passport. That being said, they do look as though they could have interesting tinkering applications. No doubt, people will dream up all sorts of cool applications for households and offices.

The Tikitag kit from Alcatel-Lucent should help with that, since it eliminates the need to actually configure hardware. Personally, I would use it to do something along these lines: Attach tags to three or four everyday objects in concealed locations. Hide readers in an equal number of places around my house. Then, when you put the candlestick on the right part of the bookshelf, the clock on the correct segment of the mantle, and the vase on the correct floor tile, a bookcase swings open revealing the entrance to one’s hidden lair…

For added security, one might put the last reader in the bookshelf itself, and the last tag in a radio-shielded pouch around one’s neck.