Geek stuff – Page 12 – a sibilant intake of breath

The Fourier transform

Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow includes a great discussion of the scientific uses of the Fourier transform. Most amusingly: “The side-to-side waving of the urine trail on the road was presumably produced by the long [elephant] penis acting as a pendulum (it would be a sine wave if the penis were a perfect, Newtonian pendulum, which it is not) interacting with the more complicated periodicity of the lumbering four-legged gait of the whole animal.” (p. 73)

This video provides an accessible visual explanation of how this mathematical tool breaks down a complicated curve into its constituent sine waves, and some of the useful applications for that transformation:

Urban mesh networking

One fascinating dimension of software-defined radio is the ability to establish mesh networks: distributed data sharing systems where each computer involved is a node which can carry traffic on behalf of others. That means that as long as you have solid radio links you can establish a network that can transmit information independently from the commercial internet, run by the kind of telecom companies that provide home internet connections. If you then connect some parts of the mesh to high-quality internet connections, you can share internet access over the mesh network.

This is all part of the plans of Toronto Mesh, a group that meets at Robarts Library and is planning to set up such a network in Toronto. NYC Mesh is much father along: with Manhattan and Brooklyn ‘supernodes’ in place which provide internet access through the mesh.

There are numerous advantages to a mesh network. It can free people of all the bad behaviour from local telcos: charging monopoly prices, slowing down traffic from some sites, engaging in surveillance themselves or supporting government surveillance, etc. It also holds the promise to create more resilient networks which are better able to cope with societal disruption. Building infrastructure of that sort will be important as climate change continues to destabilize human and natural systems.

I’m collaborating with Toronto Mesh to propose a hardware and software development partnership with the Campus Co-Operative Residence. They have a large number of houses within 1.5km of each other, share many of the values of Toronto Mesh, and would likely value the ability to control and enhance their internet access in the ways mesh networking would allow. The proposal is circulating for comments and for people to start getting familiar with it now. Soon we will develop a formal version with cost estimates to go to the Co-Op board.

AI + social networks + unscrupulous actors

Charlie Stross’s talk at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress highlights risks associated with artificial intelligence technologies in combination with factors like geolocation, the engineering of content online to produce emotional responses, and people with malicious objectives from manipulating elections to harassing women seeking abortions.

It’s worth watching, and starting to think about what sort of regulatory and technological barriers might be erected to such abuse.

Breaking loops

As an experiment in living and in an effort to protect my sleep I have set my router to disable internet access from all my devices between 2:00am and 7:00am seven days a week.

Especially when I am feeling down and wishing I could avoid things, there is a temptation to just keep clicking through YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, or news stories.

Contrary to the pervasive idea that being well-informed is all about being apprised of the latest information, there is good reason to think that the newer information is the more likely it is to the incorrect, incomplete, or useless. Over time, we filter information by quality, put things together, and benefit from additional context. That makes the news from a weekly or monthly magazine more likely to be informative than the news from the current Google News page or a social media feed, and it means reading a book which society has determined to be important almost certainly carries more lifetime value than reading the same number of words from breaking news stories.

There are other self-harming loops I have been working to disrupt in myself and better understand in other people. Despite a lot of anguish and turmoil, the overall experience of the last couple of months suggests that improvement is possible.

Ghosts of the Ostfront

I’m surprised I have never mentioned Dan Carlin’s historical podcasts here yet. I got a lot out of “Blueprint for Armageddon“, his six-part history of WWI (source of this account). Listening to his thoroughly-researched and passionately-delivered work has led me back to a number of books by serious historians as well as primary accounts. Those include G. J. Meyer’s A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 which I have gone through more than once as an audiobook and Ryan Cornelius’ The Last Battle about the fall of Berlin in 1945.

On the Greyhound trips to Ottawa and back, Myshka and I listened to three of the four episodes in “Ghosts of the Ostfront” — a macabre but instructive account of the Nazi-Soviet war from 1941 to 1945.

There are lots of reasons to be interested in the eastern front in WWII, but the familial connections were at the forefront of my mind. The series does a good job of explaining the situation faced by those in countries between the two great powers during the war, including all those who became double victims oppressed by both the Soviet and Nazi autocracies.

Carlin and his research and production team have lots of other great stuff, from a free discussion with favourite historian and thinker James Burke to his detailed history of the life of Genghis Khan to the unbelievable story of the Anabaptist takeover of Munster in 1534. His preference for the bloody ought to be noted, but to me his work doesn’t seem to revel in violence for its own sake but more to try to discern the broad lessons of history.

STEM over-emphasized?

Even at Google collaborative skills matter more than technical ones:

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

…

Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. No bullying. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.

I suppose that’s unsurprising in a sprawling corporation like Google. When you’re working to advance mass interests within a bureaucracy, human interaction can often be the most important factor. Working alone on your own project technical competence and motivation may matter most, but in a web of people the way you affect the others will often be paramount.

Modern board games

Here are a couple of interesting journalistic accounts of complex modern board games:

They both emphasize games that seek to accurately model military conflicts, particularly “A Distant Plain“, which is about the post-2001 intervention in Afghanistan.

A few years ago, I tried to convince the student government (Lionel Massey Fund, or LMF) at Massey College into buying a game called “Persian Incursion” which sought to model an Israeli attack against the Iranian nuclear weapons program. They rejected the proposal as too expensive and controversial. It would be interesting to try a game like this sometime, but no board game café where I have asked yet has carried them.

Outgoing DNA

What3Words

In an illustration of combinatorial mathematics, what3words.com will represent any location on Earth as a set of three simple English words.

It’s intended to help in cities that lack formal maps and street names.

The points it distinguishes are close enough together that for a building of any size you get various choices.

The Toronto Reference Library could be journals.nuggets.nipped.

Toronto’s best kite-flying spot: agree.rewarded.lasts.

High Park’s labyrinth? hatched.alarm.riding or drainage.draining.kitchen or playing.training.achieving.

Concept for a portable computer device: the Triple Pi

I have been curious about picking up a Raspberry Pi one board computer.

They are the standard hardware for nodes on the Toronto Mesh network, so with a suitable USB radio transceiver I could use it in small areas as a bridge to their network via the IPv6 Hyperboria network.

I could also use it to run Linux-based software-defined radio (SDR) software in combination with my USB radio receiver dongle. I could set up software to locate digital signals and then decode those which are not encrypted, or use it as a portable radio scanning rig.

At the same time, there seems to be awesome game emulation software which can be run on a Pi. With two USB-interface SNES-style controllers, I am told it has enough processing power to make a great SNES emulator.

I don’t have a screen with an HDMI input, so it might be worth getting a small portable display to use with the system. One neat idea would be to make the whole thing capable of running on its own batteries.

To start with, I will try to get a working setup that runs with the Pi and the display plugged into the wall. If it seems useful enough to be made portable, I’ll start thinking of battery hardware and case and transportation options for the whole system.

The hardware to get started will be about $100 plus the cost of the display. ToMesh has an installation party later this week where they will install the operating system and software stack necessary to use your Pi as a node.