Category: Geek stuff

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

History’s unpredictable paths

Columbus could not have foreseen the results of his search for piperine, Magellan was unaware of the long-term effects of his quest for isoeugenol, and Schönbein would surely have been astonished that the nitrocellulose he made from his wife’s apron was the start of great industries as diverse as explosives and textiles. Perkin could not have anticipated that his small experiment would eventually lead not only to a huge synthetic dye trade but also to the development of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals. Marker, Nobel, Chardonnet, Carothers, Lister, Baekeland, Goodyear, Hofmann, Leblanc, the Solvay brothers, Harrison, Midgley, and all the others whose stories we have told had little idea of the historical importance of their discoveries. So we are perhaps in good company if we hesitate to try to predict whether today there already exists an unsuspected molecule that will eventually have such a profound and unanticipated effect on life as we know it that our descendants will say, “This changed the world.”

Le Couteur, Penny and Jay Burreson. Napoleon’s Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History. Penguin, 2004.

Related: Learning and teaching

Kyocera ceramic paring knife

I have been collecting knives for years, including superb folders like Benchmade’s 940 Osborne and the Wüsthof chef, santoku, and paring knives I have been using to cook since I bought then during one of my first few weeks in Ottawa.

A few weeks ago, I visited a shop beside Trinity-Bellwoods park which exclusively sells Japanese imports. A plastic-handled white-bladed Kyocera ceramic knife caught my eye. For many years, I have sharpened my knives using the high alumina ceramic stones in my Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker, and I have been curious about the exceptional sharpness, edge retention, and corrosion resistance offered by ceramic blades.

After a few weeks of daily use, I am sold on the ceramic knife. I have never had a knife with a standard 30˚ edge cut tomatoes in the way that it will. I find myself buying more vegetables like carrots, just for the pleasure of slicing them so precisely and effortlessly.

I know ceramic knives always have a risk of shattering, and some people report them dulling quickly (apparently, using a plastic cutting board is incompatible). So far, at half the price of the Wüsthof paring knife, I would say confidently that it’s sharper, lighter, and more precise. I can report back in a year or two on whether it remains so.

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.

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.