Category: Geek stuff

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

Hillis Plot on a 13″ MacBook Pro

The Hillis Plot is a beautiful way of displaying the common ancestry of all life on Earth. The Hillis and Bull Lab at the University of Texas has several images of the plot on their website. Included among them is a PDF version with effectively infinite resolution which they say is free for “non-commercial, educational purposes”. The relationships between life forms shown in this plot were determined using rRNA sequences.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts there is a shop called danger!awesome that burns patterns onto materials like wood, metal, and plastic using powerful CO2 infrared lasers.

The PDF of the Hillis Plot is not ideal for burning into an Apple laptop because the circle in the middle is too small. It would go underneath the translucent Apple logo. Thankfully, a very helpful employee named Jesse Ashcraft-Johnson was willing to custom-modify the file so that it would fit around the logo. He also tweaked the text so the whole thing would fit well on the back of my 13″ MacBook Pro. He was also willing to run the laser for more than 30 minutes, and run it in a vector mode where the beam traced each of the lines of descent in the plot. The final result looks awesome.

Media:

danger!awesome is located at 10 Prospect Street. Their phone number is 617-714-5829 and they can be emailed at info@dangerawesome.co

Fun fact: the laser cutters at danger!awesome were first used to burn an animation into pieces of toast for an OK Go video: Last Leaf.

Googling the Cyborg

In his engaging essay “Googling the Cyborg”, William Gibson effectively argues that the expectation that ‘the cyborg’ will be a human being with an electronic eye and a robot arm is mistaken. The cyborg – he argues – exists in the physical interactions between human beings and machines: “The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerve”. (The terminology there is strangely incorrect. Cathode ray tube televisions emit photons, which are produced when the electrons fired from the back of the vacuum tube hit a phosphor screen – and the optic nerve is made of neurons, it isn’t a channel that conveys them. No matter.)

Gibson argues that the cyborg is the “extended communal nervous system” that humanity has grown for itself, with all these sensors and processors and network connections.

He also argues that there is a short-changing that occurs, when we deny that the humans who are behind machines are using them as true extensions of their own being. In the context of remote-controlled rovers on Mars, he says:

Martian jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio Shack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an airbase in California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their names: first humans on the Red Planet. Robbed of recognition by that same old school of human literalism.

Gibson, William. Distrust that Particular Flavor. p.251 (hardcover)

I am not sure what should be counted as the first cyborg on Mars. Specifically, did it need to be able to move on human command? Or is moving camera shutters enough to count? In any case, hardly anyone knows the name of the person who was controlling it when it first activated on the Martian surface.

Twitter grabbing address books from phones

Here’s an example of what I mean about the internet creating all sorts of new security vulnerabilities. Twitter has recently confessed to grabbing entire address books from the smartphones of people using the service.

As well as being a violation of privacy, this is a practice that could seriously endanger people. Consider all those brave protestors in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, using Twitter to help organize a pro-democracy movement. If Twitter is grabbing their address books, it is assembling a perfect tool for the intelligence services of governments to round up everyone involved in protests. The same is true for people pressing for democracy in China, or doing anything else that is laudable but unpopular with the people in charge.

Technology companies need to recognize that there will be people who want to use their records and capabilities for nefarious purposes, and they need to design their technology and procedures to protect against such attacks and reduce how serious they are when they take place.

The companies that make operating systems for smartphones should also assume that applications can be ineptly designed or malicious, and should work to protect the data on the phone from potential eavesdroppers.

Things to do in Boston

On Sunday, my brother Sasha and I are taking the bus down to Boston. Our plan is to explore the city for a few days.

Does anyone have suggestions of interesting or unusual things to see or do in Boston?

Similarly, does anyone have recommendations for affordable accommodation arrangements? Something like a clean and well-located hostel would be ideal.

Related:

Internet surveillance in Canada

The Conservative government is proposing a new law that would require internet service providers to monitor and record what Canadians do online, and to provide that information to the authorities without a warrant.

As well as being an obvious violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (§8 “Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.”), I think this is an example of thinking badly about security. Obviously, having the government monitor everything that happens online could prevent some bad things from happening. At the same time, it is virtually certain that the capability would be abused or that security breaches will allow it to be hijacked by those with nefarious purposes. The abuse could happen at the governmental level – say, with discreet inquiries being made into the private correspondence of members of competing political parties. It could be done within the police and intelligence services – say, a jilted ex tracking the emails of their former partner. It could be done within internet service providers – say, some low-paid tech at Bell or Telus deciding to earn a bit of extra cash by blackmailing customers.

The archives of internet use would be an irresistible target for malefactors of every type, from nosy bosses and spouses to spammers and rogue political operatives. Maintaining and trying to secure these archives would also be a major burden for internet service providers. Instead of being in the business of helping their clients communicate, they will be forced into the business of keeping tabs on their clients on behalf of the government.

The security risks created by internet surveillance are greater than the risks that it might help reduce. Furthermore, allowing the creation of internet surveillance systems violates the Charter-protected rights of Canadians. What Canadians do online is their private business. It is not something that governments have the right to monitor, just because doing so will occasionally allow them to catch people committing crimes. Hopefully, this proposal will never become law.

Canada’s coinage

The way you treat different denominations of currency probably says something about both your temperament and about the relative values of different currency units.

When I get pennies, for example, I discard them at the first opportunity. Pennies just aren’t worth carrying around.

Dimes and nickels, I put in a big glass jar. In times of extreme cash need, I may pick out a bunch to buy some ramen noodles.

Quarters and loonies I save for laundry.

Twonies (Toonies?) I save for coffee.

I am pretty happy about the relative sizes of Canada’s denominations. It’s good that the more valuable coins are generally larger. I feel a bit like pennies are a waste at this point. I suppose how you feel about them depends on how many small cash transactions you undertake each day.

Meteorologists on climate

The other day, I saw a Vancouver Sun article called “Meteorologists split on global warming“.

I was struck in particular by the sub-headline: “Fewer than one in five specialists in the U.S. see human influence as the only driver”.

At first glance, may seem like a garden-variety example of climate change skepticism from experts in fields other than climatology. People who are experts in one area often have misplaced confidence about their expertise in others.

On second reading, the sentence betrays considerable ignorance about the subject of climate. If “19 per cent of U.S. meteorologists saw human influences as the sole driver of climate change in a 2011 survey” then at least 19% of U.S. meteorologists have no idea what they are talking about.

Nobody is arguing that human behaviour – or CO2 emissions exclusively – is the only thing that affects the climate. Look up the concept of ‘radiative forcing‘ and you will quickly learn that scientists have studied many of the causes of climate change in detail. The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has involved consideration of other things. They looked at impacts from changes in ozone, albedo (the reflectiveness of the Earth’s surface), aerosols, linear contrails, and changes in the energy output of the sun. When you look at all of these factors, you see that greenhouse gases are simply the most important cause of change in the climate right now, and we are poised to emit vast additional quantities of them as the world continues to burn fossil fuels.

The TOR browser bundle

The TOR browser bundle seems like a reasonably effective and very easy-to-use means of circumventing web censorship and surveillance.

The speed of web browsing falls significantly when data is routed through the TOR network, but tools like this are increasingly essential as governments undertake more and more inappropriate meddling with the free flow of ideas online.

There are versions for various operating systems. I have tried both the Windows and Mac OS installs and they are both easy to use and at least a bit effective in avoiding tracking and censorship. Remember, however, that TOR is useless if someone is tracking all your web traffic at your point of connection to the internet, for instance by reading all the traffic through your broadband connection or cell phone. If you are worried about that, use public networks along with TOR, or set up an encrypted connection to a proxy or virtual private network and then run TOR from there.

Remember, all security bets are of if an attacker gets malware on your machine or gains physical access to it.

When to shiver and when to work

From Daniel Yergin’s The Quest:

To demonstrate environmental sensitivity [at the negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol], the Japanese organizers turned down the heating in the conference center. But this created a new problem as Kyoto in December was cold. To compensate, the Japanese decided to distribute blankets to the delegates. But they did not have enough blankets, and so a whole separate negotiation erupted over how many blankets would be allocated to each delegation. (p. 483 harcover)

Worst choice of abstinence over resistance ever.