Category: Geek stuff

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

Open thread: energy storage

One challenge with energy sources like solar and wind is that their output varies with local environmental conditions, and not necessarily in ways that correspond to energy demand.

Hence, having energy storage capacity makes them easier to integrate into the grid. There are many options: pumped hydroelectric storage, tidal storage, batteries, compressed air, molten salt, and potentially hydrogen.

It is also possible to balance output from different kinds of renewable stations, using biomass, solar, wind, tidal, and other forms of energy to cover one another’s fallow periods.

CPSA 2014, day 2

I am glad Peter Russell encouraged me to attend this morning’s “Roundtable: Constitutional Conventions, Minority Parliaments and Government Formation“. It has certainly been the most interesting session I have attended at the conference so far. I need to add Peter Aucoin, Mark Jarvis, and Lori Turnbull’s Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government to my reading list.

Next, I have a session on “Voting Determinants“.

Later, I am going to Catherine Dauvergne’s talk on “The end of settler societies and the new politics of immigration“.

Today’s last academic event will be the CPSA presidential address: “What is it a Case Of? Studying Your Own Country“.

Ghost in the Wires

A friend of mine recently lent me Kevin Mitnick‘s book Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. It’s an entertaining story that highlights how the willingness of people to trust and help others who they assume to be co-workers is often the greatest weakness in security systems.

It also highlights some of the characteristics of obsessive behaviour. I had no idea how many separate times Mitnick was caught. It reminded me of Marc Lewis’ Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, in terms of how repeated contact with agents of authority was insufficient to interrupt a longstanding pattern of behaviour.

The book is also a reminder of what seems like a more innocent era of global interconnectivity – when phone phreaks with blue boxes were a cutting-edge threat, and when the FBI would have real trouble tracking you down if you assumed the identity of someone who died in childhood. Now, attacks against computer systems seem associated more with governments themselves than with curious amateurs, and it’s difficult to imagine someone like Mitnick evading the surveillance state for long.

Graveyard of blogs

Either because people are moving away from blogging in general or because I haven’t been seeking out new blogs, many of the sites in my blogroll haven’t been updated for long spans of time.

I feel the time to pull them from the list has come – at least in the case of blogs not updated in the past six months.

For reference, here they are:

I hope all the authors have moved on to stimulating new projects.

First impressions of Gaiman

Trapped in a science fiction book store by a short spring downpour, I bought a copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. After hearing him much recommended, this is the first thing of his I’ve read. I’m enjoying the language and style of storytelling, and the similarities the premise bears to Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently books is interesting – antiquated gods existing unnoticed, having been deprived of followers by history.

There are rarely long passages that seem especially quotable, but there are lots of little fragments I like:

  • Of the security cameras in the counting room of a casino: “under the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny cameras they cannot see”
  • “There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
  • “I heard a new CIA joke. Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assasination? … He’s dead, isn’t he?”
  • “And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports. “Are you sure it’s not something like ‘The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment?'””

‘Caracoled’ is also an interesting verb.