Geek stuff – Page 28 – a sibilant intake of breath

Elocution

Jordan Peterson – Reality and the sacred:

The Major

Major Motoko Kusanagi – Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – SE02E14 “Poker Face”

Annoying things about off-camera flash photography

1) Keeping masses of batteries charged

2) The incompatibility of various wireless trigger systems (PocketWizard, Paul C. Buff, the proprietary system in the new Canon 600EX flash)

3) Finicky hotshoe adapters, for the majority of flashes lacking miniphone or PC connection ports

4) The ludicrous expense of cables required to connect radio triggers to flashes

Different journalistic interpretations of the same scientific study

Here’s the actual abstract from “Acceleration of snow melt in an Antarctic Peninsula ice core during the twentieth century“, published in Nature Geoscience:

“Over the past 50 years, warming of the Antarctic Peninsula has been accompanied by accelerating glacier mass loss and the retreat and collapse of ice shelves. A key driver of ice loss is summer melting; however, it is not usually possible to specifically reconstruct the summer conditions that are critical for determining ice melt in Antarctic. Here we reconstruct changes in ice-melt intensity and mean temperature on the northern Antarctic Peninsula since AD 1000 based on the identification of visible melt layers in the James Ross Island ice core and local mean annual temperature estimates from the deuterium content of the ice. During the past millennium, the coolest conditions and lowest melt occurred from about AD 1410 to 1460, when mean temperature was 1.6 °C lower than that of 1981–2000. Since the late 1400s, there has been a nearly tenfold increase in melt intensity from 0.5 to 4.9%. The warming has occurred in progressive phases since about AD 1460, but intensification of melt is nonlinear, and has largely occurred since the mid-twentieth century. Summer melting is now at a level that is unprecedented over the past 1,000 years. We conclude that ice on the Antarctic Peninsula is now particularly susceptible to rapid increases in melting and loss in response to relatively small increases in mean temperature.”

From the full text: “The nonlinearity of melt observed in the JRI ice-core record also highlights the particular vulnerability of areas in the polar regions where daily maximum temperatures in summer are close to 0˚C and/or where summer isotherms are widely spaced, such as along the east and west coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula. In these places even modest future increases in mean atmospheric temperature could translate into rapid increases in the intensity of summer melt and in the poleward extension of areas where glaciers and ice shelves are undergoing decay caused by atmospheric-driven melting.”

Concept for making use of Google’s ‘Inactive Account Manager’ feature

Presumably after considering the consequences of doing so, Google has become a sort of unusual executor of the digital estates of users who opt in to their ‘Inactive Account Manager’ feature.

They are given the option to set how long a ‘timeout period’ must pass before the system kicks in.

They are then allowed to automatically notify and potentially share data with up to 10 “trusted friends or family members”.

They can then add an autoresponder message, either for anyone who emails them or just for contacts.

Finally, they can set up a system to delete their account.

In a way, this looks a lot like a Dead man’s switch.

The concept

This system relies upon the autoresponder feature.

If you have data that you wish to make publicly available only after your death, encrypt it with a secure-yet-commonly-used algorithm like AES.

Put the key in the body of your Google post-mortem autoresponse email.

In all likelihood, the key will circulate and people will be able to decrypt the files which you wish for them to decrypt.

I am sure Google thought this through, but it seems to me that this system might encourage suicides. There can be a certain attraction in going out by means of a dramatic gesture, and this system makes it a lot easier.

Massey College trivia winners 2013

Two James Hansen updates

James Hansen getting arrested at an August 2011 protest against the Keystone XL pipeline outside the White House

James Hansen after getting released from Anacostia jail, 2011-08-29

Bonus: a demonstration of why I can’t just hand my camera to passers-by to take a picture

After 32 years as the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, climatologist James Hansen is retiring (New York Times, Nature). He now intends to devote more of his time and energy to pushing for action on climate change.

One recent publication of Hansen’s: “Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power” in Environmental Science and Technology. From the abstract:

Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420 000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces.

University of Toronto comprehensive exam in Canadian politics

My classmate Emma assembled many recent examples of the U of T major field examination in Canadian politics.

The exam will be based on these sources.

I can either write the exam on May 23rd or August 22nd.

Toronto350.org bibliography party

One element of developing Toronto350.org has been learning how to do complex cooperative work using a devoted group of volunteers.

This afternoon, we are having a ‘bibliography party’ for our University of Toronto divestment brief.

We will be taking all the sources people have collected and putting them into biblatex format. It will then be easy to incorporate them into our LaTeX document and produce nicely formatted footnotes and a good bibliography.

Then it will just be a matter of finishing each section of the brief and sending it out to experts for comment. It will need to be run by some people who can comment on the science, others who can comment on the law, and others who are familiar with the U of T administration.

In the end, we should have an authoritative and meticulously cited document explaining why divestment makes ethical and financial sense, and why it is in keeping with the university’s existing divestment policy.

Replacing my second flash

Having been knocked over a few more times during the Winter Ball, my LumoPro LP120 flash is now definitively dead.

I very much need two flashes to do the kind of event photography I have been doing in recent years. I therefore need to decide how to replace it.

One option is to get a new LP160. It isn’t as powerful as my Canon 430EX flash, but it’s a lot cheaper (US$180 compared with about C$350 for a Canon Speedlite 430EX II). The LP flash also has the benefit of a built-in optical slave. The big downside is that the LP flashes are not especially tough.

Another option is to shell out $600 for a Canon 600EX. It would be significantly more powerful than my 430EX, and it would actually be able to drive the other Canon flash in a TTL mode, while sitting on my hotshoe.

If I got another flash without an optical slave, it would probably be a good idea to shell out another $300 for three PocketWizard Plus X transceivers. Then I will be able to reliably drive both flashes off-camera at considerable range.