Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Quick poll on future communications

Between now and the demise of the human race (when the universe ends, if not before), will there ever be a time when there is no system with the following characteristics:

  1. Capability to transmit data to most parts of the world with significant human populations.
  2. Affordability for almost anyone with a moderate income in a moderately rich state.
  3. Accessible by most members of relatively free societies.

Basically, it should allow someone in a major populated area of North America to communicate in real time with someone in Asia, as well as transmit data.

Personally, I think something akin to the internet will exist from now on. Even in a future with harshly constrained resources or radically shifted geopolitics, it seems like the kind of thing that is too valuable to give up, especially given the relatively modest costs associated with maintaining it.

LHC activation

The hardware commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can be monitored on this website. Things are coming together fairly quickly now. The first particle beam injections took place on August 8th. On September 10th, the first full beam circulation will occur. On October 21st, the first high energy collissions should occur.

It seems likely that the collider will soon produce evidence of the Higgs Boson, and perhaps Hawking Radiation as well. Very exciting times to be watching physics, these.

[Update: 24 September 2008] Because of an overheated connection which caused a helium leak, it looks like the LHC will be out of commission until April 2009, at least. That is fairly understandable given the complexity of the machine, but it is still disappointing that we will have longer to wait for results.

Defining science

The other day, Tristan and I were trying to ‘science’ and it became evident that the term has a stack of meanings. Those at the top arguably have the most day-to-day relevance, whereas those at the bottom are arguably more fundamental to the nature of science:

  • At the highest level, science consists of the people and institutions generally considered to be undertaking scientific work. This includes today’s physicists, chemists, biologists, and so forth. In an earlier era, it would have included alchemists. It also includes universities, research centres, funding bodies, and the like.
  • At the next level, science consists of a collection of theories that explain aspects of the world. Contemporary examples include special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the germ theory of disease. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an enlightening text largely about how these emerge and change.
  • At the next level, science is a set of key beliefs. Basically, these are that the universe operates in a manner that is consistent and comprehensible. In addition, it is at least theoretically possible to come to understand its workings through observation – using the mechanism of formulating and evaluating hypotheses.

The first two are very much affected by general trends in society and thought. The third is essentially assumed in the way through which our minds access the world. While we certainly cannot always understand the causal relationships involved (and random chance may always play a role that makes complete solution impossible), our mode of thinking fundamentally requires the assumption that things cause other things according to certain rules and that in the same conditions the same rules hold. We may never be able to track the course a hurricane will follow (or the hallucination a brain will have) on the basis of what atoms were where beforehand and what laws apply to them. Even so, a basic assumption of science is that such things are theoretically knowable, within the limitations created by random chance.

When it comes to the universe as a whole. it is quite possible that the collection of governing laws exceeds the human capacity to understand and/or discover. That becomes especially plausible if we accept the possibility that ours is just one of several universes, or that it is itself embedded in something far more complex.

Previous posts about the philosophy of science:

Track stolen laptops with Adeona

Those enthusiastically toting their MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs to coffee shops and university libraries should take note of Adeona: a free program that helps recover laptops in the event of loss or theft.

Installation is very simple: download a file, double click an installer, and choose a password. Once the program is running, it can be forgotten entirely unless needed. It won’t give you the name and phone number of the disreputable person who made off with your lovely portable Mac, but it will give you information about any network the computer has been connected to. If your computer has a built-in camera, it can also be used to snap a picture of the perpetrator. That function probably also justifies putting it on any desktop PCs with an integral camera, such as the 20″ and 24″ iMacs.

The software isn’t exclusively for Apple products (though those who shell out the cash for Steve Jobs’ toys might need it most). Versions are also available for Linux, Windows XP, and Vista.

Quantity of solar energy

Advocates of renewable energy often cite the enormous amount of energy passing from the sun to the earth as evidence that their preferred electricity sources can serve all human needs. While feasibility remains an issue, the general claim is unassailable. Indeed, it can be derived from first principles:

  1. We have been merrily burning coal, oil, and natural gas for hundreds of years.
  2. This has produced both heat (which does work and eventually dissipates into the atmosphere) and greenhouse gasses.
  3. The latter increase the share of solar energy that remains trapped in the atmosphere, thus significantly heating the planet.
  4. While local heating can arise from the direct heat of fossil fuel burning, this is not a significant planetary phenomenon.
  5. Thus, the extra solar energy being retained by the planet because of greenhouse gasses is much greater than the amount of energy being added to the planet by the burning of fossil fuels and the fission of uranium.
  6. As such, the total energy incoming from the sun must be much greater than the total energy being produced through fossil fuel burning.

Of course, the energy in fossil fuels also came from the sun in the first place – back before the organic matter that comprises them got buried underground and chemically altered through heat and pressure.

To make things a bit numerical, consider this. The total amount of incoming solar energy at any point in time is about 174 petawatts (10^15 watts). That is 1.524 zettawatt (10^21 watt)-hours per year of energy. In comparison, global electricity production from thermal sources is about 11.4 petawatt-hours. That is 130,000 times less than the quantity of solar energy, despite the fact that we are burning far more fossil fuels each year than are formed during that span of time.

Enforcing open source licenses

An American court has ruled in favour of Robert Jacobsen – a man who wrote software for model trains and released it under an open source license. Ignoring the requirement in the license that derivative work credit the original and provide the original code, a commercial company made a product using the code. Under this court decision, the violation of the open source license means that the company’s behaviour consitutes copyright infringement.

I personally see a lot of value to the ‘some rights reserved’ approach of Creative Commons and others. By not requiring payment for non-commercial usage, such licenses can avoid blocking the experimentation of hobbyists. By reserving rights over later commercial usage, they prevent the abuse of materials created for general public usage. Such licenses provide the flexibility to share, along with the assurance that others will share in return.

Seeing the legal integrity of such contracts upheld is thus especially gratifying. For information on the Creative Commons license applied to my blog posts and photographs, see this page.

Editing video using still photos

Recently, there was controversy about a doctored photograph showing four Iranian missiles launching, whereas the original apparently showed three and one on the ground. Errol Morris discussed the images on the website of the New York Times.

Photo and video editing are nothing new, but some new software seeks to make the former much easier. It combines video data with that from still photographs in order to accomplish many possible aims. For instance, it could be used to improve the resolution of a whole scene or elements within it. It could also correct for over- and under-exposed regions. Of course, it could also facilitate video manipulation. The skills and software required to edit still images are increasingly available. Combine that with this software and you could empower a slew of new video fraudsters.

It will be interesting to see what kind of countermeasures emerge from organizations concerned about data integrity. One route is forensic – identifying markers of manipulation and tools for uncovering them. Another relies on requiring technologies and techniques for those capturing and submitting video. That could involve the expectation of multiple independent photos and videos produced from different angles using different equipment, or perhaps the widespread deployment of timestamps and cryptographic hashing to strengthen data integrity.

Online climate calculators

Here are two neat online climate-related calculation systems:

The first is provided by the American Environmental Protection Agency and allows for various kinds of conversions. You can work out what a volume of one greenhouse gas would be equivalent to in another gas; you can also look at a set quantity of carbon dioxide emissions as being equivalent to certain number of barrels of oil, homes heated for a year, etc.

The second site – RoofRay – lets you draw solar panels on top of buildings using the satellite photos in Google Maps. It then tells you how much it would cost to cover that area with panels, how much energy it would produce, and how long the system would take to pay off its own costs.

Portable artificial kidneys

As dialysis equipment demonstrates, the kidney may be the first vital organ that humanity manages to replicate with a good deal of success. That is especially true if prototype portable equipment proves effective. The present iteration of the ‘automated, wearable artificial kidney’ looks fairly bulky and inconvenient, but it is not inconceivable that implantable artificial replacement kidneys may eventually be possible.