The New York Times has a good piece on the late stages of the Voyager missions as they pass into interstellar space. It’s especially interesting to read about some of the unexpected faults they have encountered, and the ways they need to work within the limits of the 1977-era hardware.
Category: Geek stuff
If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.
Sometimes working for the ACLU is fun
Step 1: British comedian John Oliver produces an absurd segment about coal CEO Bob Murray:
In it, Oliver acknowledges Murray’s history of litigiousness toward critics and challenges him to do his worst.
Step 2: Murray sues Oliver for defamation in West Virginia circuit court
Step 3: As reported in Slate, Jamie Lynn Crofts of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia files one of the world’s funnier legal documents in the form of an amicus brief to the court
As John Stuart Mill said about freedom of speech in general: “Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme’, not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case”.
Political speech, news reporting, and satire all deserve special protection in the public interest. Hopefully this whole back and forth will discourage those who face criticism in the future from seeking to suppress it through the courts of a free society.
Site performance issues
I am aware that site performance here is less than ideal in at least three ways:
- Sometimes pages are simply slow to load
- Pages that do exist sometimes fail to load entirely, producing a 404 error instead
- Sometimes, pages load without images or CSS, showing only text
It’s much worse on the administrative side, with frequent page load errors and constant problems with image file uploads.
This site is WordPress-based, which means it uses PHP and a MySQL database. Instead of generating each page dynamically every time it is requested, it uses WP SuperCache, and I have tried experimenting with the plugins various settings, so far without fully resolving the problems.
The site is hosted on DreamHost’s standard, approximately $100/year unlimited storage / unlimited bandwidth shared hosting plan. It would be possible to upgrade to a virtual private server, but it’s significantly more expensive and offers rather limited storage (only 30GB for the cheapest plan).
I will work on trying to diagnose exactly what’s causing these speed and reliability problems. If WP-savvy people have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
Efforts at alien communication
An interesting genre! And you can own a gorgeous-looking replica for $100.
Four rounds into a Hive tourney
I’m playing in the qualifying tournament for the online Hive world championship.
In the first round, my opponent forfeited. In the second, I lost both games (the tournament structure is to play two against each opponent, alternating who moves first). In the third round, I won the game where I moved second (black on boardspace.net though not necessarily under official Hive rules) and so did my opponent.
Yesterday, I lost a game against an opponent playing white, then won the second game, which I think was the most interesting in the tournament so far.
I’m glad I’m not getting totally destroyed in these random match-ups, though I clearly have a lot to learn. Ordinarily, I don’t play with the pillbug expansion, which is standard for these tournaments. I need to update my opening theory to take better advantage of the pillbug and mosquito and generally improve my planning and strategic analysis. As with chess, I tend to play too tactically, which sometimes turns up surprising and effective moves, but can also leave me paralyzed in the late game.
Establishing a Responsibility to Repair
The concept of Right to Repair is meant to help consumers and tinkerers keep their vehicles, electronics, and other equipment going, despite the preferences of manufacturers that they buy something new or at least pay the original builder for any repairs.
In a more sustainable world, we can imagine a Responsibility to Repair, where any manufacturer of a product intended to be durable – from a phone or laptop to a car or house – would be expected to support repairs by providing blueprints and source code, by making spare parts available, and by designing products in the first place so that failures can be repaired (a) by individual users (b) by third-party repair centres and (c) by the company itself.
This is the opposite of the Apple philosophy of keeping everything secret, building machines that cannot be taken apart, and throwing away anything broken to replace it with something new.
In a Responsibility to Repair world, governments could keep track of all devices which consumers report as broken and impossible to fix, and then press companies to comply with regard to those items. Companies that refuse could face sactions from fines to losing the right to advertise to losing the right to make products in certain categories.
It would be the end of planned obsolescence, and the start of a much more sustainable form of consumerism. Even for companies that close down, this approach would create multiple benefits, since their design specifications and software would be openly available and their products would be designed with public repair in mind from the beginning. If one big jurisdiction like the EU were to establish laws of this kind, the benefits would be felt around the world.
Automated voice impersonation
I’ve written before about some problems with biometric security: it seems convenient to be able to use facial recognition to log in to your computer, until you find your co-workers doing it with colour photocopies of your picture.
Computers aren’t the only context where we use biometrics for identification. “Don’t you recognize my voice?” has been used for decades for authentication over the phone, whether implicitly or explicitly. Now, we’re approaching the day when faking anybody’s voice and having it say anything you like is getting near.
Expect disruption on every level, from teens pranking each other to abusive harassers terrifying victims in new ways to more election-altering political fraud.
Quantum sensors and vulnerable submarines
A recent technology quarterly about new quantum innovations, published in The Economist, referred to a disturbing development in quantum sensor technology:
Military types are interested, too. “You can’t shield gravity,” says David Delpy, who leads the Defence Scientific Advisory Council in Britain’s defence ministry. Improved gravity sensors would be able to spot moving masses under water, such as submarines or torpedoes, which could wipe out the deterrent effect of French and British nuclear submarines.
So much of the present nuclear balance of power (such as it is) depends on ballistic missile submarines being essentially invulnerable by virtue of being impossible to locate. Reportedly, almost no crew members about an American boomer (as subs carrying nuclear missiles are known) know the precise location of the ship, and nobody on land has the information.
If states suddenly feel their subs are vulnerable, it risks two big effects. First, it raises tensions in a crisis. If states fear they will lose their seaborne second strike capability, they may be inclined to launch a nuclear attack earlier. Second, if the safest leg of the nuclear triad (along with bombers and land-based missiles) suddenly seems vulnerable, it’s likely they will assemble and deploy more weapons in more locations, wasting money and raising the risk of accidental or unauthorized use.
As with other emerging nuclear-related technologies like hypersonic weapons, it would be better for everyone if we could agree to prohibit sensors that threaten subs. Alas, states are rarely so cooperative or trusting.
No more Twitter on the go
One convincing argument made by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness) is that we intuitively misjudge the importance of the newest information, which is actually the most likely to be trivial and wrong. I wrote about this before.
It’s an especially important point in the Trump era, where I can easily get into an endless cycle: Washington Post, The Guardian, National Post, Slate, Twitter, Los Angeles Times, CBC, BBC, Twitter, etc.
Quite a while ago, I took email off my phone and have found it a big life improvement. I definitely don’t need to be instantly notified every time I have a new message. One slight inconvenience is that I often use email to send information and to-do items to myself. That’s pretty easily addressed, however, by saving them into Google Calendar instead or using the BuryCoal.com contact form.
Yesterday I went a step further and removed Twitter from my phone as well. It’s a bit of a harder case, since I do genuinely learn things from Twitter that I don’t see elsewhere. It’s where I learned about divestment at Laval, for instance. At the same time, the huge majority of what I see on Twitter is a waste of time and it’s an easy reflexive form of procrastination. I still have an account accessible via Sasha’s iPad Mini and my computers, so all told this should be a helpful move.