Geek stuff – Page 17 – a sibilant intake of breath

Operant conditioning

When I see people out walking dogs, I like reaching a hand out to the creatures and seeing their reactions. Usually the humans are happy about this and volunteer information about the dog’s name and breed. Occasionally, there are people who pointedly ignore me and yank hard on the leash to punish the dog for noticing me.

These people are bad animal trainers.

On the amazing AnimalWonders Montana YouTube channel, Jessi Knudson has done an amazing job of building relationships with a wide variety of animals. She is easily able to encourage a Brazilian prehensile-tailed porcupine to get into his crate for a veterinary appointment, and has taught a dog how to painlessly have its nails cut.

She has a video about clicker training: a form of operant conditioning where the sound of a click is used to teach an animal about the precise behaviour which you are tying to encourage or discourage.

She has two videos specifically about operant conditioning: Law of Effect and Operant Conditioning.

Learning more about operant conditioning seems potentially helpful when it comes to motivating climate volunteers, working with photographic subjects, and teaching students. When things are a bit less hectic, I will need to make a preliminary foray into the literature.

The plausibility of driverless cars

There is a widespread expectation that autonomous or driverless cars of the sort being developed by Google will soon become commercially available and active on public roads. A recent Slate article makes some strong arguments for why that expectation may be premature:

But the maps have problems, starting with the fact that the car can’t travel a single inch without one. Since maps are one of the engineering foundations of the Google car, before the company’s vision for ubiquitous self-driving cars can be realized, all 4 million miles of U.S. public roads will be need to be mapped, plus driveways, off-road trails, and everywhere else you’d ever want to take the car. So far, only a few thousand miles of road have gotten the treatment, most of them around the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.

Another issue is what will happen to driverless cars when they get into a situation where they cannot function (say, a construction site includes temporary stop lights, or you turn onto a road which isn’t mapped)? I can’t see passengers being very happy when their car simply won’t go anywhere anymore, and they need to abandon it and find some other form of transport.

The instant messaging ghost town

Between when my family first got internet access (I got my first taste at the Science Al!ve daycamp at SFU, using a primitive form of Netscape) and sometime between my M.Phil / working in Ottawa / starting my PhD, I spent thousands of hours talking with all sorts of friends over ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.

Now, even though there are other options like WhatsApp and Skype, the instant messaging world seems essentially dead (or maybe all shifted to the dreaded Facebook). A whole host of people are always online, which I guess is because of being logged into email on some computer or having an account linked to a phone, but there is no real activity.

It’s probably impossible to disentangle the extent to which this is the result of people who I know growing up and no longer having time for instant messaging versus a general decline in IM use versus people shifting to platforms which I don’t use.

Little-known feature of the GPS constellation

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a constellation of twenty-one primary satellites, and three spares, in near-circular orbits 11,000 miles above the earth at an inclination of 55 degrees to its equator. While the satellites are best known for their role in allowing the precise location of individuals and objects, by 1995 they had been performing an important secondary mission for over a decade. Every GPS satellite since GPS-8, launched in 1983, had carried a Nuclear Detonation (NUDET) Detection System (NDS) package on board. The NDS includes x-ray and optical sensors, bhangmeters, electromagnetic pulse sensors, and a data-processing capability that can locate a nuclear explosion to within one hundred meters. Data is reported on a real-time basis directly to either AFTAC or ground stations at Diego Garcia, Kwajelein Atoll, Ascension Island, or Keana Point, Hawaii. See Jeffrey T. Richelson, The U.S. Intelligence Community, 4th Ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999), pp. 218-219.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea. W.W. Norton and Company; New York. 2007. p. 403-4 (paperback)

The Vela double flash

During the readout of Vela 6911, AFTEC personnel watched as a stylus drew a figure representing the variations in light intensity, as monitored by the two satellite bhangmeters. There was no data from a third optical sensor, whose mission was to provide the geographic origin of any noticeable flash of light, because it was out of commission. Nor would there be any reading from the satellite’s electromagnetic pulse sensors, which were no longer functioning. But what the technicians saw was sufficient cause for concern. The stylus drew a figure with a double hump, indicating a brief intense flash of light, a dramatic decline in intensity, and then a second, longer-lasting flash. Such double flashes had always been associated with nuclear detonations, where the fireball’s surface is rapidly overtaken by the expanding hydrodynamic shock wave, which acts as an optical shutter and hides the small but extremely hot and bright early fireball behind an opaque ionized shock front which is comparatively quite dim. The initial flash normally lasts only a millisecond and emits about only 1 percent of the total thermal energy, although it is the point of maximum intensity. It appeared that some nation or nations, in some part of the world covered by Vela 6911, had detonated a nuclear device in the atmosphere.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea. W.W. Norton and Company; New York. 2007. p. 285 (paperback)

Ultra-processed foods

New dietary guidance from the Heart and Stroke Foundation warns against “ultra-processed foods”, those that are “nutritionally unbalanced foods high in sugar, fat and salt manufactured in a way to promote over-consumption and are associated with weight gain and high blood pressure”. They include “soft drinks, packaged fruit juices, cookies, ice cream, salty snacks, ready meals and bottled sauces”.

With money tight and limited access to food storage and cooking facilities on campus, I have definitely been eating too much of this sort of stuff.

The machinations of the food and flavour industries are fairly disturbing:

Submarine intelligence on Able Archer

Parche left for the Barents shortly after yet another diplomatic scuffle, in which the Soviets boycotted the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, answering the U.S. boycott of the games in Moscow four years earlier. When she returned, it was clear that she had brought home far more than the most optimistic intelligence officials had hoped for. The taps had been recording all through the alert spiked by Able Archer and had captured a detailed look at the Soviet Navy’s nuclear strategy. This was an ear to the Soviet Navy’s nuclear command-and-control structure as it was placing some of its missile submarines on high alert, rehearsing for war. Some former intelligence officials say this information simply confirmed the picture that had been emerging from the taps about how the Soviets planned to use their missile subs. But other former CIA, NSA, and Navy officials say that Parche’s take from this mission was so critical to their understanding of the Soviets that it qualified as “the big casino,” or “the crown jewels.”

Sontag, Sherry and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs; New York. 1998. p. 245 (hardcover)

Shadowing Soviet subs during the cold war

When the Yankee subs were the best the Soviet Union had, nearly every one sent within range of the United States had been in the line of fire of U.S. subs shadowing behind. If war had broken out, those subs could have sunk the Soviet boomers before they ever fired. Then, if both sides ever launched their land-based ICBMs, only the United States would have been left with a second-strike capability tucked away in the oceans. This was the edge that the Navy had been preparing for ever since Whitey Mach first rode bronc on the Lapon. But the strategy relied on three things: that the Soviet subs remained relatively noisy; that they never realized how often they were being followed; and that they continued to patrol in open seas where they could be trailed in the first place.

…

Still, any strategy that allowed for even a few missile subs to fire at U.S. targets was a far cry from the days when most of the Soviet Yankees traveled the seas with unknown and lethal shadows that could prevent them from shooting at all. And for intelligence officials, it was a huge relief to realize that the Soviets were not readying to use their improved position [in 1984] to start a war.

Sontag, Sherry and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs; New York. 1998. p. 210, 247 (hardcover)

On Operation Ivy Bells

Finally the men were ready to crawl out the outer hatch. In the control room, McNish could see them walking what seemed a space walk. Only barely lit by their handheld lights, they cut a ghostly path through the murky water to the [Soviet] communications cable [in the Sea of Okhotsk]. Once there, they began using pneumatic airguns to blow debris and sand away from the wire. As soon as it was clear, the men started to attach the tap, a device about three feet long that held a recorder filled with big rolls of tape. Off the main box was a cylinder that contained a lithium-powered battery. A separate connector wrapped around the cable and would draw out the words and data that ran through. The tap worked through induction. There would be no cutting into the cable, no risk of an electrical short from seeping seawater.

…

Bradley saw the next step, and he saw it clearly. He wanted to tap as many of the lines as possible, and he wanted to plant a device that could record for several months or even a year, a device that would keep working in Okhotsk even when Halibut was docked at Mare Island. His staff contacted Bell Laboratories, whose engineers were familiar with undersea phone cables and began designing a much larger trap pod. Just like the smaller recorder Halibut carried on her first trip, this new device worked through induction, but this tap pod was huge. Nearly 20 feet long and more than 3 feet wide, it weighed about 6 tons and utilized a form of nuclear power. [Probably a radioisotope thermal generator.] It would be able to pick up electronic frequencies from dozens of lines for months at a time. Halibut could plant the tap one year, then go back and retrieve it the next.

…

When the new tap was finished, it looked like a giant tube that had been squashed some from the top and welded shut at the ends. The device was crammed with miniature electronic circuits and had the capacity to record for weeks at a time.

Sontag, Sherry and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs; New York. 1998. p. 171-2, 174-5, 175 (hardcover)

The 1979 Vela Incident

There are some historical events where it may be impossible for ordinary people to learn the truth. For example, there are situations where more than one nation state has a good reason to circulate a false history — complete with credible-seeming historical documents.

One such case may be the 1979 Vela incident, in which an American satellite may have detected a clandestine nuclear test in the Indian Ocean. Some analyses have concluded that no nuclear explosion took place and that the satellite malfunctioned. Historian Richard Rhodes, who has written a series of excellent books about the history of nuclear weapons, thinks that it was a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently published a long discussion of the issue.